I know how that sounds.

Dramatic, maybe. Cruel, even. There are things mothers aren’t supposed to say out loud, and I know this is one of them. We’re allowed to talk about how difficult motherhood is as long as we soften it immediately with how rewarding it is. We can complain about being tired as long as we follow it with a joke about coffee. We can say our children drive us crazy as long as everyone understands that we don’t really mean it. There is an entire vocabulary we’ve created that allows mothers to admit they’re drowning without making anyone around them uncomfortable. We’re exhausted, touched out, overstimulated, burnt out. All of those things are true, but sometimes they feel like polite little euphemisms for something much bigger that I’ve been afraid to admit for years: I became a mother, and somewhere in the process, I stopped being a person I recognized.

I don’t regret having my children. I hate that I even feel compelled to write that sentence because it says something about how little room we give women to talk honestly about motherhood. Any admission of grief is immediately treated like an admission of regret, and they’re not the same thing. I can love my children with an intensity that sometimes physically hurts and still grieve what becoming their mother did to me. I can look at them and know without hesitation that I would give my life for them while also acknowledging that, in many ways, I already did. Motherhood gave me two human beings I cannot imagine my life without, but their existence doesn’t erase mine, and loving them doesn’t mean I have to pretend there wasn’t a cost to becoming their mother.

Before I became a mother, I belonged mostly to myself. I don’t think I understood what a privilege that was because why would I? I could wake up and decide what I wanted to do with my day. I could leave the house without accounting for anyone else’s needs. I could sit in silence. I could work uninterrupted. I could spend hours reading about something completely useless simply because it fascinated me. I could get sick and simply be sick. I could be tired and go to sleep. I could have a bad day without worrying about how my bad mood would affect two tiny people watching everything I did. My time wasn’t something that existed primarily in the spaces between other people’s needs, and my body wasn’t constantly being climbed on, called for, interrupted or needed. I didn’t know that one day something as simple as being alone in a room would feel luxurious.

Then I became someone’s mother, and almost immediately the questions stopped being about me. How is the baby sleeping? Are they eating? Are you breastfeeding? How much did he weigh? Is she gaining enough? When is his next appointment? Is she hitting her milestones? The babies become the center of gravity and everyone else begins orbiting around them, including you. Especially you. You have just gone through one of the most physically and emotionally violent transformations a human body can experience, but there’s a new person in the room now, and suddenly your pain feels secondary. You’re bleeding, in pain, swollen, exhausted, hormonal and fucking terrified, but someone needs to eat every few hours, so you get up. Your body hurts, but you get up. You haven’t slept, but you get up. You don’t know what the fuck you’re doing, but you get up, and everyone calls that strength. Sometimes I ask myself if we call mothers strong because acknowledging what we’re actually asking of them would require us to change something.

I became very good at getting up. I got up when I was exhausted, when I was sad and heartbroken, when I didn’t recognize myself and when my brain felt like it was underwater. I got up when I wanted someone else to notice that I was struggling without me having to explain exactly how badly I was struggling. I learned how to function while emotionally falling apart, which is a skill I wish women weren’t praised for quite as often as we are. There is something deeply fucked up about how easily suffering becomes evidence that you’re a good mom. The more you sacrifice, the more devoted you must be. The less you need, the better. The more of yourself you can erase without complaining, the more naturally motherhood apparently comes to you.

I’ve been thinking about Lindsay Clancy a lot lately, especially since I’ve been watching her murder trial since it began. Seeing it unfold has sparked so many conversations about motherhood, postpartum mental illness and the kind of mental healthcare we provide women after we give birth, and those conversations feel both necessary and incredibly uncomfortable. For those who don’t know, Clancy pleaded not guilty, and her attorney argues that she was suffering from severe mental illness and wasn’t criminally responsible for killing her children, while prosecutors have presented a very different account of her actions and mental state. That question belongs to the jury, and I’m not interested in pretending I can answer it from my couch. I’m also not interested in turning the deaths of three children into a metaphor for how hard motherhood can be. Cora, Dawson and Callan deserved to grow up, and their deaths are deeply horrific. The exhaustion, resentment and overstimulation that so many mothers experience aren’t interchangeable with severe postpartum psychiatric illness, and pretending they are would do a disservice to both conversations.

What I can’t particularly stop thinking about is everything the trial has brought to the surface. We’re talking about postpartum depression and postpartum psychosis. We’re talking about intrusive thoughts, insomnia, anxiety, isolation, psychiatric medication and the terrifying possibility that a woman can know something is wrong with her, seek help and still continue deteriorating. We’re talking about how difficult it can be to determine where ordinary postpartum distress ends and serious psychiatric illness begins, and we’re talking about whether the systems we’ve built to care for mothers are actually equipped to recognize that difference. There is something uncomfortable about watching an unimaginably horrific case become the thing that finally forces us to have these conversations, but maybe the discomfort is precisely why we need to have them.

The testimony has made that especially difficult for me to shake. Before her children’s deaths, Clancy had interacted repeatedly with the mental healthcare system, and now a courtroom is dissecting those interactions and trying to determine what they meant. Her defense and the prosecution have offered profoundly different interpretations of what was happening inside the same woman, and I don’t pretend to know which interpretation the jury will ultimately accept. What keeps circling around in my head is a broader question that has very little to do with deciding her guilt or innocence: How bad does a mother have to get before we believe her when she says she isn’t okay?

I don’t mean that every exhausted mother is secretly on the verge of catastrophe. What I mean is that we tell mothers to ask for help while simultaneously maintaining an incredibly narrow definition of what an acceptable request for help sounds like. You can say you’re tired or touched out. You can post a meme about hiding from your children in the bathroom and everyone laughs because we’ve all been there. You can joke about desperately needing coffee or a vacation, and those are safe admissions because everyone knows how to respond to them. There are other things mothers know we’re not supposed to say quite as easily: I resent my children today. I don’t want anyone touching me. I don’t want to play. I hate being a mother today. I want to get in my car and drive somewhere nobody can find me. I love my children, and I don’t know how much longer I can live like this.

Those thoughts make people uncomfortable, and that discomfort teaches women to edit themselves before anyone else gets the opportunity to judge them. We learn which parts of our exhaustion can become funny Instagram reels and which parts need to stay locked somewhere inside us. We become fluent in translating despair into something socially acceptable. “I’m just tired. It’s been a rough week. The kids are a lot right now. I need a break.” Sometimes those statements are completely accurate, and sometimes they’re the version of the truth we think other people can handle. We tell mothers to ask for help while teaching them that there are certain thoughts a good mother would never have, and that’s a fucking dangerous contradiction.

We’ve also romanticized maternal suffering to such an extent that sometimes I don’t think we recognize it as suffering anymore. We call it sacrifice and strength. We tell women these years are short and that someday they’ll miss them. We tell them to soak it all in. We tell them to give themselves grace. We recommend bubble baths and girls’ nights and waking up an hour before the children so they can finally have some time to themselves, as though the solution to a chronically exhausted mother is for her to sleep even less. We offer women tiny coping mechanisms for circumstances that sometimes require actual structural support: childcare, healthcare, sleep, money, community, time and another fucking adult in the room. Then something terrible happens somewhere and suddenly everyone wants to know where the warning signs were.

I know something about the distance between struggling and looking like you’re doing fine because I’ve personally become very good at looking like I’m still going. I know what it’s like to erased myself slowly. There wasn’t a morning when I woke up and decided that Emily no longer mattered. It happened in increments so small that I didn’t notice them while they were happening. I stopped doing one thing because there wasn’t enough time. I stopped going somewhere because arranging childcare was too complicated. I stopped making plans because somebody always needed something. I postponed things I wanted because there was always something more urgent. I’ll do it later. I’ll go later. I’ll figure it out later. I’ll take care of myself later. “Later” is one of the most dangerous words in motherhood because it can become a year, then two, then five, and eventually you look around and realize you’ve constructed an entire life where everybody has a place except you.

The cruelest part is that I participated in it. I internalized the idea that this was simply what women and mothers did. Of course my children came first. Of course their needs mattered more. Of course I was tired. Of course I didn’t have time. Of course I couldn’t just leave. Of course I couldn’t turn my brain off. Of course somebody was calling “Mamá” while I was trying to answer an email, take a shower, eat something, finish a thought or simply exist quietly for five fucking minutes. This was motherhood. This was what I had signed up for, except I don’t remember signing up to disappear.

I don’t remember anyone telling me that motherhood could become an identity so enormous that it would consume every other version of me. I don’t remember anyone warning me that there would be days when hearing “Mommy!” for the hundredth time would make my entire nervous system recoil. Nobody told me that sometimes I would hide in the bathroom just to experience a locked door between my body and another human being. Nobody told me how guilty I would feel for wanting to be left alone or how quickly that guilt would turn into resentment and then back into guilt again. Nobody told me that I could desperately miss my children when they weren’t around and desperately need space from them when they were.

Motherhood is full of contradictions nobody can ever prepare you for. You can be lonely while never being fucking alone. You can be bored and overstimulated at exactly the same time. You can crave silence and then miss the noise when it’s gone. You can want someone to take your children away for a few hours and then spend those hours thinking about them. You can fantasize about getting in your car and driving somewhere nobody knows your name and still panic at the thought of anything happening to them. You can love being their mother and hate what motherhood feels like on a particular day. You can feel grateful and furious, fulfilled and empty, needed and completely invisible, and you can love your children without loving every version of yourself that motherhood created.

That’s honestly the hardest part for me to admit because there are versions of me that have existed since becoming a mother that I don’t particularly like. There’s the impatient version, the angry version, the woman who hears one more request and feels rage flash through her body before she can stop it. There’s the woman who sometimes doesn’t want to play, who has fantasized about silence more passionately than she has fantasized about vacations, who occasionally looks at the clock and calculates how many hours remain until bedtime. There’s the woman who has thought, I cannot do this for one more fucking minute, and then somehow continued doing it for several more hours because there wasn’t another option. I used to think those versions of me meant I was failing, but now I think they were trying to tell me something: a human being can only be needed so much before she begins desperately needing herself.

I’m 38 years old now, and sometimes I feel like I’m meeting myself again after a very long absence. I’m trying to remember what I like when nobody else’s preferences are involved. I’m trying to figure out what I want the rest of my life to look like beyond being useful to other people. I’m writing again. I’m thinking about things that have nothing to do with lunches or appointments or school schedules or whether somebody has eaten enough today. I’m allowing myself to have interests that consume me, opinions that make people uncomfortable and dreams that belong entirely to me. I’m trying to understand that wanting a life outside my children isn’t a rejection of them and may actually be something I owe them, because I don’t want my children growing up believing that love requires disappearance.

I don’t want them believing that this is simply what women do, that we shrink ourselves into whatever space remains after everyone else has been taken care of. I don’t want sacrifice to be the only evidence they have that I loved them. I want them to remember that their mother laughed loudly and wrote things and got angry about politics and read too much and became obsessed with random subjects and needed quiet sometimes and had dreams and boundaries and a whole complicated interior life that existed independently of being their mother. I want them to know that I belonged to them deeply, but I also belonged to myself.

I’m still learning how to do that, and there are days when I feel like I’m getting pieces of myself back and others when I feel completely consumed again. There are days when I can recognize the woman in the mirror and others when I’m so exhausted and overstimulated that I wonder where she went. Healing, if that’s even the right word for this, hasn’t looked like some triumphant reclamation of my former self. I’m beginning to understand that I can’t go back to her anyway. The woman I was before motherhood is gone, and that’s the grief I’ve spent years trying to name. I miss her so much sometimes. I miss how free she was without knowing she was free. I miss the way she could make decisions without calculating how they would ripple through an entire household. I miss the body that belonged only to her. I miss her time and energy. I miss how enormous the world felt when her life could still move in a thousand different directions.

I also know things she didn’t know. I know how much I can survive. I know how deeply I can love. I know the terrifying vulnerability of having pieces of my heart walking around outside my body. I know what it means to keep going when there is absolutely nothing left in the tank, and I know that strength isn’t always beautiful or the least bit inspirational. Sometimes strength looks like crying in the bathroom, washing your face and walking back into the living room because somebody needs a snack. Sometimes it looks like admitting that you’re angry and exhausted instead of turning those feelings into another reason to hate yourself.

I know “death” isn’t quite the right word for what happened to me the day I gave birth to both my kids, although for a long time it has felt like the only word big enough. Maybe there was a burial. Maybe there was grief. Maybe there are pieces of that woman I’ll never recover, and I’m finally allowing myself to mourn them without immediately apologizing for it. Motherhood gave me people I cannot imagine existing without, but it also cost me things I wasn’t prepared to lose, and both of those statements are true without either one canceling out the other.

I’m tired of pretending love makes sacrifice painless because it doesn’t. Sometimes love costs you something, and motherhood cost me a version of myself. For years, I thought my job was to accept that quietly, to be grateful, to keep getting up, to keep giving pieces of myself away and call the emptiness that remained devotion. Fuck that. I don’t want the woman I was before my children back because I couldn’t become her again even if I tried. Too much has happened. I’ve loved too much, lost too much, survived too much and learned too much. What I do want is to know the woman who exists underneath all the roles I’ve accumulated: mother, caregiver, worker, the person who remembers everyone’s appointments, finds everyone’s missing things and answers when somebody calls from another room.

Somewhere underneath all of that, I’m still here, and for the first time in a very long time, I want to know what happens if I stop putting her last.

If you consumed American political media over the last few weeks without knowing anything else about the United States, you might reasonably conclude that one of the most pressing threats facing the country is a 35 year old socialist Twitch streamer named Hasan Piker. Apparently, while the Trump administration expands executive power, carries out an increasingly aggressive immigration agenda, attacks political opponents, pushes the boundaries of what a president can do without meaningful congressional restraint, and presides over a country where millions of people are still struggling with the cost of simply existing, what we desperately need to talk about is Hasan… Again. His old livestream clips are being excavated, his relationships with politicians are becoming stories themselves, Democratic candidates are being asked to explain their proximity to him, and political strategists are debating whether a guy who spends several hours a day livestreaming from his house is somehow a liability to the Democratic Party. The New York Post has practically turned Hasan into a beat at this point, publishing story after story about progressive candidates who have committed the apparently newsworthy offense of knowing him, appearing with him, or, God forbid, saying something nice about him.

I say this as someone who’s watched Hasan on Twitch for years and agrees with him on a lot of things, but also disagrees with him sometimes and has criticized him when I think he’s wrong. And listen, I call this man “bebecito”, “mi amor”, and “nene lindo” with absolutely no shame, so I’m not going to sit here and pretend I’m an unbiased observer, I’ve got eyes. But even I can admit that he doesn’t always make defending him easy. Hasan’s got this incredible ability to take an otherwise perfectly defensible argument and phrase it in the one specific way that’s guaranteed to produce the most catastrophic fifteen second clip imaginable. Sometimes I’m watching it happen live thinking, “Hasan, por amor a Dios, you know these people are recording you, right?” He says provocative shit, he’ll go on tangents that require a minor in Hasanology to understand once someone clips thirty seconds out of a eight hour stream, and sometimes he’s simply wrong. There are legitimate criticisms to make of him, and being his fan or a leftist doesn’t magically make someone immune from scrutiny. If anything, Hasan generates enough material on his own that nobody needs to dig through eight-year-old livestreams like they’re conducting a fucking archaeological excavation.

Having watched him on Twitch since 2018 though, I also think the circumstances around him have fundamentally changed. I don’t expect him to suddenly become perfect or start filtering every thought through whatever the New York Post might write about him the next morning, and I certainly don’t want him to turn into another painfully media trained political commentator who speaks exclusively in sentences approved by a communications team. But Hasan isn’t talking within the same ecosystem he was seven years ago anymore. He’s got an enormous spotlight on him now, and every sentence is being picked apart by people actively looking for something they can weaponize against him and, increasingly, against the politicians who associate with him. At some point, I do think something has to give. Maybe that means being a little more deliberate about how he communicates certain arguments without changing what he believes, because watching him occasionally hand these people ammunition they were already desperately searching for can be incredibly frustrating. But that’s just me, though.

Still, none of that explains the sheer disproportion of the coverage. Hasan isn’t a member of Congress. He doesn’t write legislation, command the military, or control a federal agency. He can’t deport anyone, cut anyone’s Medicaid, impose a tariff, sign an executive order, or take food assistance away from a family. He has a fucking Twitch channel. A very large and politically influential Twitch channel, certainly, but still a Twitch channel, and the fact that people with actual political power have managed to turn him into a recurring national controversy should make us ask a much more important question than whether Hasan said something offensive on a livestream seven years ago… what aren’t we talking about while we’re talking about him?

Propaganda doesn’t always require the government handing a script to a television anchor and ordering them to read it. Sometimes it’s about deciding what deserves our attention, what gets repeated until it becomes politically important, what gets framed as dangerous, and what becomes so normalized that we barely notice it anymore. The American media absolutely reports on the Trump administration’s failures, and pretending otherwise would make this argument far too easy to dismiss. There are excellent journalists doing serious investigative work every day, often while their own newsrooms are being gutted around them. My problem is with what happens after the reporting, with what becomes the story, what dominates cable news panels, what gets discussed for three days instead of three minutes, and what every Democratic politician suddenly has to answer for.

There’s certainly no shortage of actual shit happening. We’re watching an administration dramatically expand executive power, pursue an enormous immigration crackdown, attack political opponents and institutions, and continue testing the limits of presidential authority, while Americans are still worried about housing, healthcare, groceries, and whether the economy is working for anyone who isn’t already wealthy. We could probably fill every cable news hour for the next six months discussing decisions being made by people who actually control the federal government and still not get through all of it, but apparently, we’ve got room for another segment about what Hasan Piker said yesterday on Twitch.

And no, I don’t think fucking Rupert Murdoch, Donald Trump, and a bunch of media executives are sitting around a conference table every morning deciding what Americans should be distracted by that day because they don’t need to. American media exists inside a corporate structure with owners, shareholders, advertisers, access incentives, audience pressures, and deeply embedded assumptions about what constitutes normal politics. Sinclair is probably the clearest example of how ownership can shape coverage. Researchers studying stations acquired by the company found that they increased national political coverage, decreased local political coverage, and shifted their political content in a more conservative direction. Meanwhile, consolidation continues across local television, including Nexstar’s expansion and the FCC’s move toward eliminating the longstanding national television ownership cap. This sounds like mind-numbingly boring regulatory shit, but it absolutely matters because whoever owns the infrastructure through which millions of Americans understand politics has tremendous influence over what they see in the first place.

That doesn’t mean every journalist working for a corporate news organization is secretly taking orders from a conservative billionaire. The structural problem is more important than any individual journalist. Ownership shapes incentives, incentives influence priorities, and priorities shape coverage. A fifteen second Hasan clip is cheap, clickable, and instantly understandable. But explaining healthcare policy requires reporting and expertise. Unfortunately, outrage travels faster than nuance, and America’s entire media economy has been built to reward it.

Abdul El-Sayed is a perfect example of what happens when that machinery moves from an internet personality to an actual political candidate. After winning Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary, El-Sayed was repeatedly pressed about his relationship with Hasan and his old “America deserved 9/11” comment. He called the comment dumb, made clear that America didn’t deserve 9/11, and refused to participate in the ritual of completely disavowing a person because of one offensive statement from years ago. Still, the relationship itself became politically significant. Before we can talk about Abdul’s healthcare policy, labor policy, foreign policy, or economic agenda, apparently he first has to prove that he hasn’t been contaminated by the politics of someone standing somewhere to his left.

And we shouldn’t dance around another part of this: Abdul El-Sayed is Muslim. The vocabulary changes when the politician being discussed is Muslim, Arab, Latino, Black, or otherwise outside the image of who American political culture has historically imagined when it pictures political authority. Criticism becomes suspicion, and political disagreement becomes a question of loyalty. Associations become evidence, particularly when Israel and American foreign policy enter the conversation.

We’ve seen variations of this with Zohran Mamdani, AOC and Ilhan Omar for years. AOC became a national political figure, and almost immediately there was a bizarre fascination with everything about her except, at times, the politics that made her popular. She’d been a bartender, she danced in college, she wore a “Tax the Rich” dress to the Met Gala, she uses social media, she’s too loud, too socialist, too ambitious, too whatever the outrage cycle requires that week. A young Puerto Rican woman from the Bronx became one of the most recognizable politicians in the country, and enormous portions of the media ecosystem turned her into a character. Even discussions about whether she’s becoming more “pragmatic” or “moderate” tend to assume that political maturity naturally means moving closer to whatever Washington already considers acceptable.

Ilhan Omar gets an even uglier version. An American congresswoman can somehow remain perpetually foreign because the people attacking her know exactly what they’re doing when they invoke Somalia, question her loyalty, or suggest that criticism of American foreign policy makes her less American. Trump has repeatedly used exactly that rhetoric against her. Abdul is asked to account for the people around him, AOC becomes a cultural object whose clothes and personality can generate as much attention as her policies, Zohran Mamdani gets treated as though a democratic socialist proposing things like rent freezes, free buses and taxing the wealthy is some kind of terrifying ideological experiment rather than a politician responding to the fact that New York has become impossibly expensive for working people, and Ilhan Omar is treated as though her Americanness itself remains open to debate. They aren’t experiencing identical things, and race, religion, gender and immigration shape the attacks against each of them differently, but all four are forced to navigate a political culture where some people enter the room already considered legitimate and others have to continuously prove they belong there.

This contrast becomes even harder to ignore when you look at what white politicians are allowed to survive. They can support catastrophic wars and eventually become respected elder statesmen. They can advocate policies that take healthcare or food assistance away from millions of people, and the press will describe it as a disagreement over spending. They can say horrifying things about immigrants, Muslims, Palestinians, or transgender people, and political reporters will translate it into bloodless language about “energizing the base.” But Abdul appears with Hasan, and suddenly the association itself is politically significant. AOC or Zohran Mamdani propose taxing extreme wealth and immediately become the scary socialist faces of the Democratic Party, and Ilhan Omar says something against Benjamin Netanyahu, and we’re holding another national seminar about whether the Democratic Party has an antisemitism problem.

It’s fascinating how rarely the inverse question receives the same urgency. When Republican politicians associate with conspiracy theorists and neonazis like Nick Fuentes, why isn’t every Republican required to answer for them? When elected officials embrace Christian nationalism, why doesn’t every Sunday show begin by asking Republicans to condemn it before discussing anything else? When conservative influencers say racist, misogynistic, or genuinely authoritarian things, why isn’t their proximity to Republican politicians treated as evidence that the entire party has become dangerously radical? Far right movements are routinely analyzed through the language of electoral strategy, while left wing movements are analyzed through the language of extremism. That isn’t political neutrality, they just want to pretend it doesn’t have an ideology, if that makes sense.

Even the word “radical” has become almost meaningless because it usually describes distance from the political establishment rather than the actual extremity of a policy. Medicare for All, taxing billionaires free public college, stronger unions, and ending unconditional military support for Israel are considered radicall. Yet maintaining a healthcare system where access to treatment depends on employment and income is simply healthcare policy. Billionaires spending fortunes influencing elections is campaign finance. Sending weapons abroad is foreign policy. Corporations buying more of the media ecosystem is the free market. One side is constantly required to justify itself as an ideological project while the other gets to disappear into the category of normal.

Democrats don’t help themselves either. Republicans identify someone on the Left as dangerous, conservative media amplifies it, mainstream media asks Democrats whether they condemn the person and Democrats dutifully line up to prove they’re one of the reasonable ones. They condemn, distance themselves and reassure everyone that the scary socialist doesn’t represent them, accepting the premise that association with someone on the Left requires an explanation. Republicans effectively get to choose the Democratic Party’s villains, and suddenly Democrats are talking about Hasan Piker instead of asking why healthcare remains unaffordable, why housing has become unreachable for so many people or why an administration that promised to make life cheaper hasn’t solved the material problems Americans were told it would solve.

And let’s be honest, the obsession with Hasan Piker stopped being about Hasan a while ago. He’s become a convenient stand-in for a much bigger shift that the political and media establishment doesn’t seem to know what to do with. Traditional media no longer has the monopoly it once had over how Americans understand politics, particularly younger Americans. Streamers, podcasters, and independent outlets can give progressive candidates access to enormous audiences without many of the traditional gatekeepers of Democratic politics. A politician can sit with Hasan for an hour or two and have a substantive conversation that would be almost impossible within the constraints of a six minute cable news segment, and millions of people might watch it.

Maybe that loss of control is part of what’s causing so much anxiety. Instead of seriously asking why people are abandoning traditional political media for Twitch, YouTube, podcasts, and independent outlets, it’s easier to assume those audiences have been manipulated. If young people listen to Hasan, he radicalized them. If they support democratic socialists, someone poisoned their understanding of economics. If they’re furious about Gaza, capitalism, healthcare, rent, wages, or billionaires, an internet personality must’ve convinced them to be angry.

Or, I don’t know? Maybe they just looked around? Maybe they watched corporations report enormous profits while groceries became more expensive, watched homeownership move further out of reach, watched politicians insist universal healthcare was unrealistic while finding extraordinary amounts of money for war, watched the United States provide weapons used in the destruction of Gaza, and watched billionaires accumulate more wealth and political influence while ordinary people are repeatedly told that fundamental structural change was simply too unrealistic to consider. Then a guy on Twitch says capitalism might have something to do with it, and somehow he’s the “radical extremist”? Give me a fucking break.

Maybe the radicalizing force isn’t Hasan Piker. Maybe it’s America. None of this means Hasan is always right, or that Abdul El-Sayed, Zohran Mamdani, AOC, Ilhan Omar, Bernie Sanders or other progressive figures should never be criticized and challenged. It means our political media should be capable of distinguishing between criticism and ideological policing, between journalism and spectacle, and between people who say provocative things and people who actually possess the power to materially change millions of lives. We should pay attention not only to what the media reports, but to what it repeats, amplifies, normalizes, and quietly allows to disappear, because deciding what the country spends its time talking about is itself a form of political power.

The most effective propaganda isn’t always the story somebody tells you. Sometimes it’s the story they convince you is more important than everything else, and if we can spend days debating whether a Twitch streamer is too radical for the Democratic Party while the people actually running the country reshape the government around us, maybe the distraction isn’t a failure of American political media at all. If you ask me, the distraction is the point.

About two years ago, I realized something about myself that I’m almost ashamed to admit: I fucking hate summer break.

Every year around May, the rare unicorn parents start showing up on my social media feeds, talking about how excited they are to have their kids home for the summer. They make summer bucket lists, buy the cliché matching swimsuits, plan trips, and even count down until the last day of school. I see those posts and immediately feel guilty because my first reaction isn’t excitement. All I feel is this overwhelming sense of dread because all I can think about is how the fuck I’m supposed to survive two whole months without completely losing my fucking shit. And listen, I know how awful that sounds. Believe me when I say that nobody has judged me more harshly than I have.

I personally don’t think motherhood has made me a worse person. If anything, I think it’s made me confront so many parts of myself I didn’t know existed. It’s made me realize how much of my identity was tied to having autonomy, and how suddenly that freedom disappeared after I became a mom. I don’t think anyone ever tells women that part. We hear about sleepless nights, diapers and tantrums. We hear about unconditional love and sacrifice. But we don’t hear that one day you’ll realize you can’t remember the last time your life belonged to yourself.

As I’ve mentioned many times before, I work from home, which means summer break doesn’t just mean the kids are home 24/7. It means my entire workday happens inside the same walls where my children are trying to exist. There isn’t a commute that separates my work from home, or an office where I can close the door and become someone other than “Mamá” for a few hours. My bedroom is literally my office, and my office is inside the house where my children need me every few minutes. Some days I feel like I’m living ten different lives simultaneously and somehow failing at all of them.

My daughter is 6 years old. She’s autistic, nonverbal, still wears diapers, and I still have to help her through most of her meals because if I don’t, she won’t eat at all. There are days when I look at her and realize that, in so many ways, I’m still caring for a baby. I don’t say that because I’m asking for sympathy, and I definitely don’t say it because I resent her, I say it because it’s the fucking truth. She needs me in ways that most 6 year olds don’t, and I don’t have the luxury of pretending otherwise. Summer is especially hard because school gives her something I can’t recreate by myself. It gives her routine, predictability, teachers, and people who understand her. Then one day it’s gone, and the responsibility of holding her entire world together falls right back onto my shoulders.

At the same time, I have a 4 year old son who wakes up every morning with the energy of someone who’s been personally hired to make sure I never finish a thought. He’s funny and smart and exhausting in the way only four-year-olds can be. He needs attention for entirely different reasons than his sister does, and both of them deserve a mother who’s present. They deserve patience, love, and someone who isn’t constantly looking at the clock because she still has work to finish after they go to bed. That’s the part that breaks my heart the most. I always feel like somebody is getting a version of me that has already been depleted by someone else.

The thing that has surprised me most about motherhood isn’t how much I love my children. People tell you about that part all the time. What surprised me is how much grief came with becoming a mother. I grieve my freedom. I grieve my spontaneity. I grieve the woman who could wake up on a Saturday morning and decide what she wanted to do without thinking through twenty different variables first. I grieve silence and boredom. I grieve leaving the house with nothing but my keys and my wallet. I grieve the version of me whose thoughts belonged exclusively to her. I think people hear something like that and immediately assume it means I must regret having children.

What I regret is how completely motherhood consumes women. I regret that we’ve built a society where mothers are expected to disappear so completely into caregiving that admitting you miss yourself feels like a confession. I regret that we’re still expected to carry so much invisible labor while pretending it isn’t labor at all. Every appointment, therapy schedule, grocery list, school email, permission slip, and tiny detail that keeps a family functioning lives somewhere in my brain. I don’t know what it feels like to stop thinking anymore. I don’t know what it feels like to exist without constantly anticipating somebody else’s needs.

People love talking about the village. I honestly don’t know what they’re talking about. Maybe some people have one. Maybe they always did. I definitely haven’t experienced motherhood that way. I experience it as a constant awareness that if I don’t remember something, there’s a good chance nobody else will. I experience it as carrying an endless mental checklist that resets every morning before I even have time to drink my cafecito. I experience it as feeling guilty every time I want something that belongs only to me because wanting time for yourself somehow becomes selfish the moment you’re a mother.

Sometimes I wonder how women before me did this shit. Then I remember that’s probably the wrong question because every generation of women has carried a different version of impossible. Mine looks different than my mother’s did, and hers looked different than my grandmother’s. I don’t think motherhood has ever been easy. I think women have just been expected to endure it quietly, and somewhere along the way we started calling that strength instead of asking why we’ve built a world that asks so much of mothers in the first place.

Listen, I don’t know what the point of this essay is, other than admitting something I’ve spent a long time feeling guilty about, and I’m pretty sure other moms out there do too. I love my children more than anything in this world. I’d give them every piece of me if I had to. The truth is, I already have. I guess that’s why some days I miss myself so much. I guess that’s why summer fills me with such an enormous dread. Maybe it’s my way of waiting for someone to say, “Of course you feel this way. Look at everything you’re fucking carrying.”

Nobody ever does. So I guess I’m saying it to myself.

This past weekend, I couldn’t escape Taylor Swift’s wedding even if I tried. Every time I opened my phone there it was again, another article cataloging the guest list, a possible breakdown of the dress, an estimate of how much everything cost, more headlines insisting that this was a cultural event that somehow demanded the attention of millions of people. What fascinated me most, though, was everyone else. Millions of people willingly turned themselves into spectators for a celebration that represented a level of wealth they'll never come close to experiencing, and somehow almost nobody stopped to ask why. Why are we expected to care this much? More importantly, why are we expected to celebrate it?

We learned that monarchies belong to history, learn about revolutions in school and congratulate ourselves for living in societies where no one is born into royalty and no one deserves special treatment simply because of their status. Kings and queens, we’re told, are relics of another era, symbols of inherited privilege that democratic societies supposedly rejected long ago. That’s a comforting story, but it isn’t true. We didn’t abolish royalty, we commercialized and branded it. We replaced crowns with billion dollar brands, palaces with sprawling estates, royal decrees with publicists, and court gossip with entertainment journalism. The rituals stayed exactly the same. We still obsess over what the ruling class wears, where they vacation, who they marry, what they eat, how they excercise, and celebrate themselves. The only difference is that instead of calling them monarchs, we call them celebrities.

Of course, Taylor Swift isn’t the first billionaire to receive this treatment, but she’s arguably the most successful example of it. She's still presented as the "talented genius" songwriter who writes deeply personal songs about heartbreak, love, and growing up, an artist whose vulnerability has been carefully woven into a public image that convinces millions she's still relatable despite living a life that bears almost no resemblance to their own. It’s an extraordinary branding achievement because it encourages people to separate Taylor Swift the person from Taylor Swift the billionaire, as though accumulating that much wealth has no political significance whatsoever. The result is that criticizing her wealth feels, to many people, like criticizing a friend. That’s exactly how parasocial relationships work, and it’s exactly why they’re so politically useful.

The coverage surrounding the wedding made that painfully obvious. Very little of it asked whether this level of extravagance says anything about the economic system that produced it. Instead, we were invited to admire it. We were encouraged to consume every detail, to marvel at the luxury, rank the outfits, speculate about the guest list, and participate in the spectacle as though watching billionaires celebrate themselves is somehow meaningful to the rest of us. It’s honestly one of capitalism’s greatest accomplishments. It doesn’t simply produce extreme inequality, but it also convinces people that we should be living under that inequality and become emotionally invested in it. We don’t just tolerate obscene concentrations of wealth anymore. We follow them on Instagram, defend them on social media, and treat every display of excess as another chapter in a story we’re “lucky” enough to witness.

The weirdest part is that this kind of criticism immediately makes people uncomfortable, if not outright angry. The response is almost always the same: "She earned it." "She's talented." "She's worked hard for her money." "Why are you so jealous?" What's frustrating is that none of those responses actually engage with the argument being made, they simply sidestep it. For the record, I don't like Taylor Swift. I don't listen to her music, and I will never understand the level of cultural obsession surrounding her. But none of that has anything to do with what I'm arguing here. I don't think she lacks talent, and I don't doubt that she's worked incredibly hard to build her career. I also don't believe success should be punished. Those are all beside the point, because talent, hard work, and success are not the same thing as billionaire wealth. What I reject is the idea that talent and hard work naturally produce billionaire wealth. They don’t. Millions of people are also talented, just like millions of people work themselves into the fucking ground every single day, working double shifts, driving for Uber after work, cleaning hotel rooms, stocking grocery shelves, teaching classrooms with supplies they bought themselves, caring for elderly parents, raising children, and still worrying about whether they’ll have enough money left at the end of the month to pay the electric bill. They will never become billionaires because that kind of wealth isn’t simply the reward for labor. It’s the product of an economic system that allows extraordinary amounts of value to accumulate in the hands of a tiny number of people while everyone else is told that maybe, if they just “hustle a little harder”, they can join them one day.

That’s why I find the constant references to Taylor Swift’s charitable giving so intellectually dishonest. Every time someone criticizes her wealth, another article or Swiftie will inevitably remind people that she donated $26 million to charitable causes before her wedding, as though philanthropy functions as some kind of moral force field. Suddenly the conversation isn’t about wealth concentration anymore, but about gratitude. “Aren’t you happy she gives back?” “Shouldn’t we celebrate her generosity?” Charity has never been a substitute for justice, and it has certainly never been an adequate defense of billionaire wealth. If anything, philanthropy has become one of the most effective public relations tools available to the ultra rich because it allows them to remain the protagonists of every story. They accumulate unimaginable fortunes through an economic system that concentrates wealth at the top, donate a fraction of it, receive glowing headlines celebrating their generosity, and emerge not as beneficiaries of inequality but as compassionate heroes. The conversation shifts away from whether anyone should possess that much wealth in the first place and toward whether we should applaud how generously they’ve chosen to spend a tiny portion of it.

It frustrates me even more how criticism of Taylor Swift has somehow become politically taboo. Criticize an oil billionaire and people assume you’re making an argument about capitalism. Criticize a hedge fund billionaire and people understand you’re talking about wealth inequality. Criticize Taylor Swift and suddenly you’re accused of hating successful women, being jealous, or simply looking for reasons to be offended. It’s an incredibly effective defense because it disguises political criticism as personal resentment. Feminism doesn’t require us to stop criticizing billionaires because they’re women. If anything, reducing feminism to the defense of female billionaires completely empties the movement of any meaningful politics. Equality doesn’t mean celebrating women who successfully climb to the top of an economic hierarchy that continues exploiting everyone beneath them, it means questioning why that hierarchy exists at all.

More than anything, the wedding exposed how easily we've accepted the notion that simply being extraordinarily wealthy makes someone's life inherently newsworthy and culturally significant. The event dominated headlines for no reason other than the fact that one of the biggest celebrities on Earth decided that getting married at fucking Madison Square Garden was somehow a normal thing to do. Seriously, think about how fucking bizarre that is. Millions of people spent days discussing a celebration they weren't invited to, could never afford, and had absolutely no stake in, while the very same media ecosystem continues to portray demands for affordable housing, universal healthcare, stronger labor protections, higher wages, and free public transit as politically unrealistic, fiscally irresponsible, or outright dangerous. We're expected to admire the excesses of billionaires without hesitation, yet politicians like Zohran Mamdani and other Democratic Socialists who argue that people should be able to afford rent, see a doctor without risking bankruptcy, or organize a union without retaliation are routinely branded as extremists, communists, or existential threats to America. The irony would be hilarious if it weren’t so deeply revealing.

Somehow, a billionaire spending an unfathomable amount of money on a wedding is treated as aspirational, while the idea that working people deserve dignity is treated as radical. That tells us everything we need to know about whose interests our media is willing to protect and whose interests it's determined to undermine. And listen, the problem isn't that people enjoy celebrity gossip, I truly don’t give a fuck about that. If that’s your thing, you do you. My issue is that we've built a media ecosystem that consistently elevates the lives of billionaires over the material conditions shaping everyone else's, encouraging us to obsess over the ruling class while dismissing the people fighting to make ordinary life more affordable as if they're the ones asking for too much. I know there are people reading this who will insist I’m taking all of this too seriously, that it’s just a wedding, that people are allowed to have fun, that not everything needs to become a political discussion. But that’s exactly the point. Nothing exists outside politics when you’re talking about billionaires. Wealth, ownership, and the media are political. The stories we choose to elevate, and the people we decide are worthy of admiration are political. Pretending otherwise doesn’t make those realities disappear, it simply makes them easier to ignore. That’s precisely why billionaire culture is so effective, because it convinces people that we’re consuming harmless entertainment when, in reality, we’re participating in the normalization of an economic order so unequal that we’ve stopped recognizing its absurdity.

That’s why I couldn’t bring myself to feel even a little bit inspired by this whole spectacle. I wasn't watching two celebrities get married, but another reminder that we never really escaped aristocracy. We simply learned to call it “pop culture”. We don’t kneel before kings anymore, but we do line up to celebrate celebrities and billionaires. Somewhere along the way, we convinced ourselves that democracy had replaced aristocracy, when in reality we simply gave it another name, stronger public relations, and fan bases willing to defend it for free. That’s what made Taylor Swift’s wedding so unsettling to me. It wasn’t the flowers, the venue, or even the unimaginable absurd wealth on display. It was realizing that we’ve become so accustomed to treating billionaires like royalty that a lavish celebration of extraordinary privilege no longer strikes us as obscene, but as aspirational. If that isn’t the defining contradiction of 21st century capitalism, I don’t know what is.

I’m writing this while I’m incredibly angry, which is usually when I know I need to write. The more I think about the conversations we’re constantly having about government, taxes, public spending, and who deserves help, the angrier I get. We’ve spent decades pretending we’re arguing about one thing while quietly arguing about something else entirely. Every election cycle and debate over healthcare, housing, education, disaster relief, or student debt eventually circles back to the same tired slogan that “government is the problem”, and it’s become such an accepted piece of political folklore that we rarely stop to ask whether it’s actually true.

I don’t think it is. In fact, I think one of the greatest political scams ever pulled wasn’t convincing people that government is inefficient or corrupt, because governments can absolutely be both of those things. The real scam was convincing millions of ordinary people that they don’t rely on government at all. Somewhere along the way, “government” became synonymous with food assistance, public housing, Medicaid, unemployment benefits, and anything else that might help working people survive another month, while everything that quietly keeps society from collapsing somehow stopped counting as government. We drive on public roads without thinking about who built them, expect firefighters to show up when our homes are on fire, trust that the water coming out of our faucets won’t make us sick, assume bridges won’t collapse beneath us and airplanes won’t fall out of the sky because somebody, somewhere, inspected them before takeoff, and expect weather satellites to warn us about hurricanes, the FDA to make sure our medicine isn’t contaminated, and emergency rooms to treat us whether we arrive by ambulance or walk through the front door bleeding. None of those things are considered examples of government overreach because we’ve absorbed them into the background of everyday life, which is precisely why they become invisible. Government only seems to exist when it’s helping someone we’ve already decided doesn’t deserve the help.

That’s the part that pisses me off the most, because we don’t actually spend much time arguing about whether government should exist. That debate was settled generations ago, and every modern society depends on public institutions to function whether people want to admit it or not. What we’re really arguing about, and what we’ve probably always been arguing about, is who gets to benefit from those institutions. We don’t have a philosophical disagreement about government. We have a moral disagreement about deservingness, and we’ve disguised it as an economic debate because that sounds far more respectable than admitting we spend an enormous amount of time deciding which people deserve security and which people are expected to suffer quietly.

Listen to the language we use because it’s never accidental. Oil companies receive subsidies, banks receive bailouts, and corporations receive tax incentives. Developers receive abatements, defense contractors receive billions in government contracts, and professional sports franchises receive publicly funded stadiums. Those aren’t framed as handouts or dependency because they’re described as investments, economic development, or incentives for growth. Then a struggling family receives food assistance, a college graduate asks for student debt relief, a disabled person receives public benefits, or a single mother applies for rental assistance, and suddenly we’re drowning in conversations about personal responsibility, government waste, and socialism. Guess what? The fucking money often comes from the exact same place. What’s changing isn’t the principle behind the spending, but the identity of the person receiving it.

It’s remarkable how quickly people who claim to despise government suddenly rediscover its value the second it starts protecting something they personally care about. The loudest advocates for “small government” still expect functioning courts to enforce contracts, police departments to protect property, the military to defend the country, the FAA to regulate aviation, public infrastructure to support commerce, and disaster relief to arrive after floods, wildfires, tornadoes, or hurricanes. Nobody whose house is underwater tells FEMA to turn around because they believe in the free market, and nobody calls the fire department to ask whether extinguishing their burning home constitutes government overreach. Somehow government magically stops being socialism the moment it’s your neighborhood that’s on fire.

Puerto Rico understands this contradiction better than almost anywhere else because we’ve spent generations living inside it. Every hurricane season we’re reminded how quickly the conversation shifts from praising Puerto Rican resilience to questioning whether we’re receiving “too much” federal assistance, as though resilience is supposed to replace functioning infrastructure or somehow keep the lights on. Every prolonged blackout, water outage, school closure, and healthcare crisis becomes another opportunity for people to declare that government doesn’t work, while almost nobody asks why the same government had no problem creating the policies that left the island so vulnerable in the first place. We’re expected to recover from disasters while living under a colonial relationship that limits our political power, subjects us to federal decisions we can’t fully influence, and then blames us for the consequences of those decisions. Apparently government is perfectly acceptable when it’s imposing austerity, appointing fiscal oversight boards, privatizing essential services, or protecting the interests of bondholders, but the moment Puerto Ricans ask for functioning schools, affordable healthcare, reliable electricity, or disaster relief, we’re suddenly expected to prove we’ve earned it? What the fuck?

The same contradiction exists everywhere you look. Politicians who insist universal healthcare is unaffordable somehow never struggle to find billions for corporate subsidies or military spending. People who lecture struggling families about pulling themselves up by their bootstraps rarely demand that multinational corporations do the same before accepting tax incentives worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Entire industries survive because governments choose to support them, yet we’ve somehow convinced ourselves that helping ordinary people pay for insulin, childcare, housing, or college is the real threat to fiscal responsibility. It’s complete bullshit, and the fact that we’ve normalized it is probably the most impressive piece of political messaging conservatives have ever pulled off.

The free market has never existed in the pure form people romanticize because every successful economy in the world is shaped by public investment, regulation, infrastructure, education, research, transportation, courts, and legal protections. Silicon Valley didn’t emerge from the fucking wilderness through grit alone, Wall Street wouldn’t function without an enormous legal and regulatory framework protecting financial markets, and corporations love to celebrate entrepreneurship right up until they need taxpayer money to rescue them from the consequences of their own bad decisions. Government has always been deeply involved in creating wealth. The only question has ever been whose wealth it’s willing to create and whose survival it considers optional.

That’s why these conversations become so emotionally charged, because underneath every debate about healthcare, housing, taxation, education, wages, disaster relief, childcare, or public transportation sits another question that almost nobody wants to say out loud. Who deserves stability? Who deserves dignity? Who deserves another chance after losing everything? Who deserves protection when life falls apart? Whose suffering is simply accepted as the cost of doing business, and whose suffering immediately becomes a national emergency demanding urgent action?

I think about that every time I hear someone argue that feeding hungry children is too expensive while celebrating another round of tax breaks for billionaires. I think about it every time Puerto Rico is mocked for needing disaster relief after decades of federal policies helped create the very vulnerabilities we’re now expected to overcome on our own. I think about it every time healthcare is treated like a luxury instead of a prerequisite for participating in society, and every time politicians praise “hardworking Americans” while quietly excluding anyone whose labor isn’t profitable enough to deserve protection. The more I think about it, the more obvious it becomes that this has never been a debate about the size of government. It’s always been a debate about whose lives are considered worthy of public investment.

That’s why this conversation makes me so fucking angry. We’ve spent decades arguing about the wrong question because we’ve allowed politicians to convince us that government itself is the enemy while quietly expanding government whenever doing so protects wealth, corporations, financial markets, or private property. We’ve been taught to resent public investment only when ordinary people are the ones asking to benefit from it, and that’s not an accident. It’s one of the most successful ideological projects of the last half-century because it convinced millions of people to defend a system that repeatedly tells them they’re undeserving of the very institutions their tax dollars help sustain. Everyone wants government. They just want to make damn sure they’re the ones standing on the receiving end of its protection while pretending everyone else should have to earn theirs.

A few days ago, I was scheduling an appointment when I glanced at my calendar and realized my birthday is next Tuesday. The date had been sitting there the entire time, quietly approaching while I worried about everything else. I stared at it for a second, genuinely surprised. Thirty-fucking-eight. Less than a week away.

As a child, this would’ve been unthinkable.

Birthdays were the most important event of the year. I’d begin counting down weeks in advance and then proudly announce the remaining days to my mother every chance I got. Twenty-five days. Seventeen days. Eight days. Three days. I treated my birthday like a major national event that required constant public updates. Looking back, I must have been absolutely annoying about it. My mother never seemed to mind. She’d laugh, listen to my countdown, and pretend this information was as urgent to her as it was to me, even though there was zero chance she was going to forget the day she gave birth to me.

My father was different. Most years he couldn’t have told you how old I was. Sometimes he remembered my birthday. Sometimes he didn’t. At some point I stopped expecting, or even caring, if he remembered it at all. Children adapt to disappointments faster than they should. They absorb them into the architecture of their lives and learn how to move around them. I don’t remember being shocked when he forgot, I just eventually understood that he probably would.

When you’re a kid, birthdays feel like the best fucking day ever. They feel like proof that you’re the center of the universe, at least for one day. Family and friends would call. Your social media notifications would be flooded with birthday messages and well wishes. There’s cake and excitement. The whole day exists because you exist. Looking back, I think that’s what I loved most about birthdays. They felt like evidence that I mattered enough for people to remember. Now I have to check my calendar to remember my own birthday.

Eventually, life happened. Somewhere between becoming a wife and mother, a very unexpected second pregnancy, navigating my daughter’s autism diagnosis, surviving cervical cancer, building a career, ending a twelve year marriage, managing a household, paying a mortgage, and carrying the endless invisible labor that seems to follow women wherever we go, I slowly moved to the bottom of the list. There was always something more urgent demanding my attention.

The older I get, the more I realize adulthood isn’t what I thought it would be. When I was younger, I imagined growing up meant gaining control. I thought adults had answers and there would be a point where things stabilized. I truly believed that if you worked hard enough, planned carefully enough, and made responsible decisions, life would eventually settle into something predictable. Instead, I’ve spent much of my adulthood watching systems fail in real time.

I’ve watched parents become case managers because schools don’t have enough resources. I’ve met families that became healthcare advocates because nobody else was advocating for them. I’ve watched ordinary people spend hours fighting insurance companies, government agencies, utility providers, and bureaucracies that seem designed to exhaust them into submission. I’ve seen people work harder than ever while feeling less secure than ever. I’ve watched neighbors go without water and power. I’ve had to say goodbye to friends and family because they couldn’t imagine building a future in Puerto Rico anymore. Somewhere along the way, we accepted responsibilities that were never supposed to belong to us, and naturally, we became our own social safety nets.

I think about that often, about how many people my age are exhausted in ways that have nothing to do with getting older. We’re fucking tired because every institutional failure eventually lands on someone’s kitchen table. Need healthcare? Childcare? Special education services? You better figure it out. Need reliable electricity, affordable housing, clean water, decent wages, retirement security, or any confidence that the future will be better than the present? Good fucking luck! We were sold a version of adulthood built around independence and self-sufficiency, only to discover that independence increasingly means being abandoned by systems that no longer function and being expected to carry the weight ourselves.

When I was a child, the future felt infinite, and every birthday represented possibility. Every year felt like a step toward some larger adventure waiting for me in adulthood. Nobody tells you that adulthood often feels like maintenance. Nobody tells you how much of your life becomes paperwork, logistics, scheduling, budgeting, advocating, caregiving, and managing crises. Nobody tells you how much energy it takes to simply keep everything from falling apart. And yet, despite all of that, life kept happening.

My daughter and son were born. I laughed harder than I thought possible. I made friends I never would’ve met otherwise. I found community in unexpected places. I survived things that terrified me. I lost things I thought I’d have forever. I discovered strengths I never asked for and resilience I would’ve gladly returned if given the option. I fell apart and put myself back together more than once.

If thirty-eight-year-old me could talk to that little girl counting down the days until her birthday, I don’t think I’d tell her much about the accomplishments. I wouldn’t tell her about degrees, jobs or promotions. I wouldn’t tell her how much money she’ll make or what title she’ll eventually put on her LinkedIn profile. I’d tell her that life is going to be far more complicated than she imagines and far less fair than she’s been promised. I’d tell her that some people she loves are going to disappoint her in ways she won’t fully understand until many years later, that she’ll spend too much time trying to save relationships that can’t be saved, and that one day she’ll learn the painful difference between loving someone and being able to build a life with them. I’d tell her that she’ll sit in doctor’s offices hearing words that will make the room feel as small as a New York City apartment closet, that she’ll carry fears she never imagined carrying, and that there will be nights when she’s convinced she cannot possibly hold one more responsibility, solve one more problem, fill out one more form, attend one more appointment, or survive one more setback. Then the morning will come, as it always does, and somehow she’ll get up and do it anyway.

I’d tell her that she’ll become the kind of mother she needed when she was young. That the things that break her heart will also teach her how to protect other people’s hearts. That she’ll discover strength in herself that she never asked for and never particularly wanted, because strength usually arrives disguised as necessity. Most importantly, I’d tell her that she never loses herself entirely. The hopeful kid counting down the days until her birthday survives all of it. The grief, the disappointment, the diagnoses, the uncertainty, the heartbreak, and all the ways adulthood slowly strips away the stories we’re told about how life’s supposed to work.

I know she’s still there because I can hear her every time I get angry about an injustice that doesn’t affect me personally, every time I refuse to accept that things have to be this way, and every time I find myself believing that people deserve better than what they’re being given. She has every reason to be cynical by now. God knows I’ve given her plenty. Somehow, she keeps choosing hope anyway. Against all odds, she still cares.

Fuck, maybe that’s what surprises me most as I approach thirty eight, the fact that I haven’t become a cynical psychotic bitch. Some days cynicism and giving up feels so much easier, and the world seems determined to prove that hope is a foolish investment. Somehow, I keep choosing it anyway.

The years I spent waiting for birthdays felt endless. Now, the years seem to move at an impossible speed. One minute you’re yelling countdowns across your childhood home, the next you’re staring at a calendar wondering how the hell you’re about to turn thirty-fucking-eight years old.

I don’t know exactly how I feel about that yet. Guess you’re going to have to ask me next Tuesday.

Living in Puerto Rico often feels like being handed an endless series of problems that were created by someone else and then being told it’s your job to figure them out.

The power goes out and people immediately ask whether you have a generator or solar panels. The water service fails and you’re supposed to invest in a cistern. The roads are full of potholes and you’re expected to memorize where they are so you don’t destroy your suspension. Public schools don’t have adequate resources and parents organize fundraisers. Medical appointments take months to secure and patients spend hours calling specialists, begging for cancellations, and navigating insurance companies that seem designed to wear people down. Salaries don’t keep up with the cost of living and everyone is encouraged to start a side hustle, monetize a hobby, or somehow work even harder than they already are.

What’s incredibly frustrating is how Puerto Ricans have normalized this. We don’t react with surprise anymore because we’ve spent so many years living in a constant state of managed dysfunction that we’ve started treating it like the natural order of things. We trade survival tips the way people elsewhere exchange restaurant recommendations. We know which pharmacies are more likely to have medications in stock. We know which roads flood first. We know which neighborhoods lose power the fastest. We know how many gallons of water we should keep on hand and which apps are best for tracking outages because apparently being a resident of Puerto Rico now requires the skill set of an emergency management coordinator.

The older I get, the more I realize that an enormous amount of life on this island is spent compensating for failures that shouldn’t exist in the first place. We spend so much time discussing how to adapt that we rarely stop to ask why we’re constantly adapting at all. Nobody should have to build their entire life around preparing for the next outage, the next service interruption, the next bureaucratic nightmare, or the next bill increase. Yet that’s exactly what many of us do because experience has taught us that if we don’t prepare ourselves, nobody else is coming to help.

What really pisses me off is that this reality is constantly reframed as something noble. Every time Puerto Rico gets hit with another crisis, we’re reminded how resilient we are. Politicians, corporationsand news stories celebrate our resilience. That fucking word sounds positive until you realize it’s often being used to describe people who have been abandoned. A person who survives a disaster is resilient. A community that helps each other through an emergency is resilient. A population that has to repeatedly compensate for institutional failure over the course of decades is carrying burdens that were never supposed to belong to them in the first place.

The thing about resilience is that it isn’t free. It costs money, time, energy, and peace of mind. Every workaround requires labor. Every backup plan requires resources. Every system failure creates additional responsibilities for people who are already stretched thin. The family that buys a generator isn’t solving the electrical grid. They’re spending their own money to compensate for a broken system. The parent fighting for educational services isn’t fixing public education. They’re dedicating countless hours to navigating bureaucracy because the system isn’t doing what it’s supposed to do. The person juggling three jobs isn’t solving economic inequality. They’re trying not to drown.

As the mother of an autistic child, I’ve seen this dynamic over and over again. Parents become experts in therapies, insurance policies, educational accommodations, evaluations, waiting lists, medical terminology, and legal rights because they have no fucking choice. You quickly learn that if you don’t advocate relentlessly, things don’t happen. If you don’t follow up, call back, send emails, attend meetings, keep records, and stay on top of every detail, your child can get lost in a system that already has more demands than resources. The expectation is that families will simply figure it out, and after a while you start noticing how often that phrase appears in Puerto Rico.

Figure it out.
Find a way.
Resolve it yourself.
Handle it.

You can see this pattern everywhere once you start looking for it.

Take electricity. We’ve spent years listening to promises that privatization would modernize the grid, improve reliability, and create a better experience for consumers. Instead, people plan their lives around outages. Small business owners lose revenue. Parents worry about keeping food refrigerated. Families spend money on generators, batteries, solar systems, fuel, and backup plans because they’ve learned that depending solely on the electrical grid is a gamble. Every rate increase arrives with a reminder that customers are paying more while still carrying the responsibility of preparing for failure. The burden gets shifted from the institutions responsible for providing a service to the people paying for it.

The same thing is happening with water. Thousands of residents in Carolina, San Juan, Guaynabo and Loíza continue dealing with recurring service interruptions severe enough that legislators are now demanding answers from the Autoridad de Acueductos y Alcantarillados. Residents, businesses, hotels, and even the airport have reportedly incurred additional expenses simply to maintain access to a resource that should be reliably available in the first place. Water isn’t a luxury or a premium service. Water is one of the most basic functions a government is supposed to provide, yet entire communities are being conditioned to treat prolonged interruptions as something they simply have to endure while keeping extra supplies at home and rearranging their lives around failures in public infrastructure.

At the same time, we’re being told that Puerto Rico should welcome massive luxury developments that will place even greater demands on resources that already appear stretched to their limits. The proposed Esencia megaproject in Cabo Rojo has become one of the most controversial examples. Supporters describe it as an economic opportunity. Critics have raised concerns about its environmental footprint, its impact on housing affordability, and its enormous demand for water. The project is expected to require well over a million gallons of water per day. That’s a staggering amount of water in an island that can’t consistently guarantee reliable service to the people already living here.

What drives me even more insane is the contradiction embedded in every part of this conversation. We are constantly told to conserve water, to prepare for outages, and that infrastructure improvements take time, that resources are limited, and that everyone needs to do their part. Yet somehow there always seems to be enough capacity when the conversation shifts to luxury developments, tax incentives, and private investment. When your power goes out, that’s your problem. When your water stops flowing, that’s your problem. When your electric bill increases, that’s your problem. When a massive development threatens to place additional strain on public resources, you’re told not to worry because someone else has a plan. Puerto Ricans have heard that fucking promise before.

I truly believe one of the most damaging consequences of living this way is that it shrinks our expectations. After enough years of dysfunction, people stop demanding functioning institutions because dysfunction starts to feel inevitable. We become experts in survival and amateurs at imagining something better. We get so accustomed to managing crises that the idea of reliable public services begins to sound unrealistic. We stop asking why the fuck things operate this way and start discussing the most efficient methods for enduring them. Puerto Rico doesn’t have a resilience problem, we have a problem with being asked to rely on resilience far more often than anyone should.

The fact that people continue to persevere despite so many obstacles says something admirable about the character of this island and the communities that sustain it. It also says something deeply troubling about the systems that continue to fail them. A society can survive on resilience during emergencies. It cannot build a future on resilience alone. People deserve more than instructions on how to cope. They deserve infrastructure that functions, public services they can depend on, and institutions that solve problems instead of transferring them to citizens one burden at a time.

Puerto Ricans have spent generations proving that we’re resourceful, adaptable, and resilient. Frankly, we’ve proven it so many times that nobody should have to ask anymore. The real question isn’t whether we’ll find a way through the next crisis, but why we’re still expected to.

I don’t think human beings were ever meant to absorb this much suffering at this volume for this long while still being expected to function normally every single day. We wake up and immediately open apps that deliver war footage, political violence, economic collapse, death, natural disasters, starvation, cruelty, corruption, and grief directly into our nervous systems before we’ve even had our morning cafecito, and then somehow we’re still expected to continue participating in society like our brains aren’t quietly overheating in the background all the time.

The thing that keeps unsettling me is how seamlessly human suffering now exists inside the exact same ecosystem as entertainment. A video of a family mourning their dead gets wedged between somebody promoting protein powder, a podcast clip about dating, an influencer doing a skincare routine, and a meme about pop culture drama. The algorithm processes all of it the same way because emotionally devastating footage and funny content both accomplish the exact same thing for these platforms: keeping people online. Everything gets flattened into engagement on our social media feeds.

After years of living online like this, I honestly think people have started losing the ability to emotionally distinguish between witnessing tragedy and consuming content. The internet has trained us to experience world events through participation, reaction, performance, and visibility. The second something horrific happens, everybody immediately begins producing discourse around it in real time. There are instant explainers, moral positioning, outrage, commentary, and pressure to publicly say the correct thing fast enough before the algorithm moves on to the next catastrophe. Sometimes it feels like people barely even process what happened before pivoting into content production mode around it.

I don’t even think most people are consciously malicious when they do this anymore, which is part of what makes the whole thing feel so bleak. I think social media has genuinely rewired people’s brains into feeling like visible participation equals morality. Silence online now gets interpreted as complicity, indifference, ignorance, or lack of awareness, so everybody feels pressure to immediately perform public emotional responsiveness at all times. You’re expected to post, comment and share resources. Expected to signal that you care loudly and visibly enough for other people to witness it. Meanwhile actual human suffering continues completely untouched by how optimized the discourse surrounding it becomes.

The emotional whiplash of modern internet life feels genuinely dystopian sometimes. I can be scrolling through footage of people grieving unimaginable loss and then immediately see an ad for sneakers thirty seconds later. I’ll read about a humanitarian crisis while simultaneously getting push notifications about livestream drama, celebrity gossip or whatever bullshit everybody collectively decided to obsess over that day. There’s something deeply disorienting about consuming the worst things happening on Earth through the exact same device people use to post thirst traps and argue about podcasts.

I especially feel this as someone who works in digital marketing because being online for me isn’t optional. My job literally depends on constantly monitoring platforms, trends, engagement, news cycles, audience behavior, content performance, algorithm shifts, discourse, cultural moments, and public reaction in real time. I spend huge portions of my day inside the exact machine I’m criticizing here, which honestly makes the psychological exhaustion feel even harder to escape because there’s no meaningful separation between work, information, entertainment, and emotional exposure anymore. Everything exists inside the same apps, feeds, and the endless scroll.

One minute I’m scheduling branded content for a client, reviewing ad performance, answering emails about campaigns, or brainstorming social copy, and the next minute the algorithm serves me footage of people documenting unimaginable suffering in real time. Then immediately after that, I’ll get a meme, influencer drama, a sponsored ad, a livestream clip, or somebody arguing in a comment section like the entire internet hasn’t collectively become emotionally radioactive. Your brain never gets the chance to properly compartmentalize any of it because the platforms intentionally collapse everything into one continuous experience designed to keep you consuming nonstop.

I think people outside this industry sometimes underestimate how psychologically invasive constant connectivity becomes when your income depends on staying extremely online. There’s pressure to remain culturally aware all the time because social media moves at an absurd pace and clients expect you to understand trends, conversations, public sentiment, and platform behavior almost instantly. The internet stopped feeling like a place people visit a long time ago. For a lot of us, especially people working in digital media, communications, marketing, or content, it feels more like an atmosphere we’re trapped breathing constantly whether we want to or not.

I especially feel this as a parent because there’s no real off switch anymore. I’ll be helping my children with something, answering client emails, trying to focus on work, cleaning the house, figuring out dinner, doing completely ordinary daily life things while my phone continuously delivers evidence of human suffering in the background all day long. It creates this constant ambient psychological weight that never fully leaves your body. Even when you put the phone down, your brain doesn’t fully disconnect from the awareness that somewhere, at every moment, something terrible is happening and there’s an endless stream of footage proving it.

I think people carry enormous guilt about becoming emotionally numb online, but I honestly think a lot of that numbness comes from psychological overload more than cruelty. Human brains are not built to sustain this level of continuous emotional intensity indefinitely. The feed never stops. There’s always another tragedy loading. Another war or act of violence. Another outrage cycle or horrifying video people are expected to witness in real time while still continuing through normal life under capitalism like emotionally stable productive workers.

And what makes all of this feel even darker is that these platforms financially benefit from keeping people emotionally overwhelmed. Outrage keeps people scrolling, fear keeps people engaged, anger increases interaction, and emotional intensity drives traffic. Human suffering has become incredibly profitable inside digital ecosystems built entirely around attention extraction. The more horrifying something is, the more visibility it generates. The more reactive people become, the longer they stay online feeding the machine with engagement, discourse, arguments, reposts, threads, commentary, and content.

Sometimes it feels like the internet transformed humanity itself into a permanent spectacle that nobody is allowed to stop looking at because too many industries now depend on monetizing our emotional reactions to everything happening around us.

And honestly, I think that’s part of why so many people feel emotionally fried all the time now. Everybody’s nervous system is carrying far more than it was ever designed to hold.

What nobody really prepares you for after divorce is how disorienting it feels to suddenly exist outside of survival mode while simultaneously having absolutely no fucking interest in letting another person disrupt the peace you fought so hard to rebuild. People talk about divorce like the hardest part is the ending itself, but honestly, for me, the strangest part has been what comes after, specifically this weird emotional limbo where you slowly start feeling like yourself again while also realizing you are nowhere near ready to hand that version of yourself over to somebody else.

And I think people misunderstand that, especially when you’re a woman in your late 30s with children, because society has this bizarre expectation that divorced women are either supposed to become inspirational Pinterest quotes about “starting over” or immediately launch themselves back into dating like contestants on a reality show called Trauma, But Make It Hot. Meanwhile, I’m over here trying to survive freelance work, co-parenting logistics, emotional exhaustion, and the daily realities of raising two children, one of whom is autistic and requires a level of structure, attention, advocacy, patience, and emotional presence that fundamentally changes the way I move through the world.

Once you become responsible for tiny human beings, especially children who depend on consistency and emotional stability, your tolerance for bullshit drops to almost medically concerning levels. That’s the part nobody tells you.

Dating in your late 30s after divorce is not the same thing as dating in your 20s because you no longer view relationships as abstract romantic possibilities. You view them as potential disruptions to an ecosystem you fought like hell to stabilize. My life is not just “me” anymore. It’s routines, school schedules, emotional regulation, therapies, work deadlines, grocery runs, pediatric appointments, overstimulation, exhaustion, trying to carve out moments of peace between responsibilities that never fully stop. When you live like that for long enough, peace itself becomes intimate in a way I genuinely do not think people understand unless they’ve lived it too.

I used to associate intimacy with intensity because I think a lot of us are conditioned to. We’re taught that love is supposed to consume and destabilize you, make you feel insane with longing and anxiety and emotional chaos. We romanticize drama so much that calmness almost feels suspicious when you first encounter it. But after divorce, especially after years of emotional burnout, your entire nervous system recalibrates. Suddenly the sexiest thing imaginable is not passion or grand gestures or somebody blowing up your phone at 2AM, it’s emotional stability. It’s somebody who communicates clearly. Somebody who doesn’t create confusion where there doesn’t need to be any. Somebody whose presence doesn’t immediately make your body feel tense. Once you finally experience peace, even briefly, you become incredibly protective of it. After years of misery, that peace is sacred.

Which is why being desired again after divorce feels both healing and horrifying at the exact same time. There’s a part of you that slowly wakes back up when you realize people still see you as attractive, funny, interesting, desirable, or worthy of attention outside of your role as a mother or former wife. That realization heals something you didn’t even realize had gone numb. You remember you still exist as a woman separate from your responsibilities, and honestly, that can feel surprisingly emotional after years of feeling like your entire identity revolved around caregiving and survival.

But attention also feels terrifying now because you understand the cost of letting the wrong person into your life. Before marriage, divorce, children and emotional exhaustion, dating felt experimental — now it feels consequential. My peace is no longer hypothetical. My children’s stability is my main priority. My emotional energy is limited and precious in ways it simply wasn’t when I was younger. I will never romanticize dysfunction anymore because I know exactly how expensive and taxing it becomes over time.

And to be clear, I’m not dating. I’ve been asked out, but I haven’t gone on a single date since my divorce. And honestly? I have no desire to anytime soon. I think people assume loneliness automatically translates into readiness, but those are two completely different things. Sometimes I miss companionship, intimacy, and having another adult witness my life and understand the million invisible things that happen inside a household every single day. But none of that means I’m ready to hand somebody access to the peace I rebuilt from scratch.

Also, modern dating looks like absolute fucking hell. I’m never downloading dating apps because I would genuinely rather get a root canal than participate in whatever psychological warfare is happening on there. Every story I hear sounds less like romance and more like a group project designed by Satan himself. Sometimes I think maybe I’m emotionally opening myself up to the possibility of love again, and then I watch the way people communicate now and immediately feel my spirit leave my body. My single friends will tell me about grown men texting them “wyd” at midnight and suddenly I’m reaffirmed in my commitment to solitude and protecting my goddamn peace.

But underneath the jokes, because humor is how I metabolize almost every difficult thing in my life, there’s something genuinely vulnerable about all of this too. I don’t think I’m cynical about love now, if anything, I think I finally understand it better. I no longer confuse anxiety with chemistry or inconsistency with mystery or emotional suffering with passion. I don’t want intensity or confusion anymore. I don’t want emotional labor disguised as romance. And I definitely don’t want to spend years teaching another grown adult how to communicate kindly or show up consistently.

What I want now sounds almost embarrassingly simple. I want softness and honesty. I want someone whose presence feels calming instead of emotionally disruptive. Someone who understands that love is not just attraction or chemistry, but consideration, patience, reliability and safety. Someone who sees the life I’ve built, complicated and exhausting and beautiful as it is, and treats it with care instead of the constant chaos I endured for years.

And maybe that’s why I’m not ready to date yet, because for the first time in a very long time, I finally understand how valuable peace actually is, and I’m no longer willing to sacrifice it just because loneliness occasionally shows up disguised as readiness.

Puerto Ricans are constantly lectured about corruption as if it’s some uniquely local defect, some cultural pathology that exists independently from the United States and its political machinery. But the latest ProPublica investigation makes something painfully obvious: Puerto Rico’s corruption problem has never been separate from American power, it has always been entangled with it.

According to ProPublica, federal investigators looking into drug trafficking inside Puerto Rico’s prison system uncovered what they believed was a broader scheme involving prison gangs allegedly exchanging drugs for votes in favor of now Governor Jenniffer González Colón during the 2024 election. Investigators reportedly gathered evidence involving inmates and correctional staff and were exploring whether there were political connections beyond the prison system itself before prosecutors were allegedly instructed to stop pursuing election-related charges after Donald Trump returned to office.

To be absolutely clear, Jenniffer González has not been charged with a crime, and she has publicly denied the allegations and any suggestion of improper involvement (bullshit). However, the story remains deeply disturbing because it raises questions that go far beyond one politician or one election cycle. The issue here isn’t simply whether corruption may have occurred, but what it means when investigations into potential electoral misconduct appear vulnerable to political pressure from the very institutions supposedly responsible for safeguarding democratic integrity.

In Puerto Rico that question lands differently because people here are already living inside the consequences of institutional distrust. For decades, Puerto Ricans have watched corruption scandals repeat themselves with almost mechanical regularity. Arrests happen and headlines explode constantly. Politicians then go on to perform the classic “outrage” for cameras, and investigations drag on for years. Then eventually the story dissolves into procedural ambiguity, partisan excuses, legal technicalities, or public exhaustion. At this point, corruption no longer feels like an interruption to governance, it feels embedded within governance itself. The scandal is how survivable it seems to be for the people closest to power.

That normalization changes a society in many ways. People stop expecting accountability because it starts feeling conditional, and the public trust erodes so consistently that cynicism becomes a survival mechanism. Every new revelation gets absorbed into the background noise of daily instability, where people are already juggling blackouts, inflation, housing costs, failing infrastructure, healthcare problems, a failing education system, and the constant pressure of trying to survive inside a colonial economy that extracts far more than it gives back.

These allegations carry even more weight given the long history of abuse, neglect, and instability inside Puerto Rico’s prison system. The island’s prisons have long been associated with overcrowding, abuse, poor medical care, and decades of documented human rights concerns severe enough to trigger federal oversight in the past. ProPublica notes that prison organizations initially formed around advocacy and survival before some evolved into criminal structures operating within correctional facilities. The investigation allegedly uncovered a system where addiction and dependency could be weaponized politically through gangs operating inside prisons with the cooperation or indifference of correctional employees.

That matters because prison populations are among the most controlled and vulnerable groups in society. If investigators truly uncovered evidence suggesting incarcerated people were being coerced or manipulated through drugs in exchange for political support, then this goes beyond ordinary corruption — this cuts directly into the legitimacy of the democratic process itself.

The broader political context also makes the story even harder to ignore. ProPublica also reported that Puerto Rico’s inmate vote has historically been politically significant because elections on the island are frequently decided by relatively small margins. Political analysts interviewed by the outlet described prison voting blocs as a longstanding “stronghold” for the New Progressive Party (PNP), particularly in close elections. The 2024 election was exactly that kind of environment, with Jenniffer González emerging from a competitive primary before winning the governorship. The implications of any alleged effort to manipulate inmate voting therefore become impossible to separate from the island’s broader political landscape.

At the same time, the relationship between Jenniffer González and Donald Trump’s political orbit adds another layer to the story that cannot be ignored. Jenniffer González has positioned herself as one of Trump’s strongest allies in Puerto Rico while Republicans increasingly view Puerto Rican voters on the mainland as electorally valuable. ProPublica notes that President Trump publicly praised her victory and that her administration has closely aligned itself with his regional and security priorities. None of that proves wrongdoing, of course, but it inevitably raises a lot of red flags when a politically sensitive investigation allegedly loses momentum after a transfer of power in Washington. This is where Puerto Rico’s colonial reality becomes impossible to separate from the scandal itself.

Puerto Rico exists in a political gray zone where federal authority is immense but democratic accountability remains incomplete and uneven. Washington controls major aspects of the island’s economic and political reality while Puerto Ricans themselves lack full representation within the very federal system governing them. That imbalance creates fertile ground for institutional distrust because people are repeatedly reminded that power over Puerto Rico often exists elsewhere, beyond their direct control.

The United States frequently presents itself as the global defender of democracy, yet Puerto Rico functions as a constant reminder that democratic protections inside empire are conditional. Oversight fluctuates, priorities shift and accountability becomes flexible depending on who holds power or who’s politically useful in a given moment. The result is a system where people are expected to trust institutions that often appear inconsistent in how aggressively they pursue justice.

Imagine if a similar story emerged from a mainland state involving allegations that prison gangs exchanged drugs for votes tied to a governor aligned with a sitting president, followed by reports that prosecutors were pressured to step back from election-related charges after a presidential transition. National media would be in full constitutional-crisis mode within hours. Cable news panels would spend weeks screaming about democratic collapse while dramatic orchestral music played beneath giant graphics reading “THREAT TO AMERICA.” But Puerto Rico occupies a strange space within the American political imagination. We’re only visible when convenient, disposable when uncomfortable, and frequently treated as peripheral to the larger national story. That invisibility protects systems of power more effectively than people realize.

The bleakest part of this story may be how familiar the outcome already feels. Just another investigation swallowed by time absorbed into the public’s emotional fatigue. Another moment where institutional credibility takes a hit while political machinery keeps functioning exactly as before.

Corruption becomes incredibly dangerous once it stops feeling exceptional and people already assume that powerful figures will avoid consequences no matter how serious the allegations become, democracy itself starts losing meaning. Elections cannot function purely on procedure. They also require public belief that the systems surrounding those elections are legitimate, transparent, and accountable regardless of party or ideology.

And that belief is becoming increasingly fragile, both in Puerto Rico and across the United States.

They told me there’s a fifty percent chance, which is objectively a wild way to receive information about your own body, because that’s not even a direction, that’s a coin flip, that’s a situation where technically I could just stand outside, look up at the sky, call heads or tails, and feel like I’m participating in the process, except I’m not, obviously, because the coin is inside my body and no one’s letting me see how it lands.

I’m writing this on a plane, on my way back to Puerto Rico from New York, which feels fitting in a way I didn’t plan, because I’m quite literally in transit while also mentally stuck in a situation that refuses to move forward at the same pace as everything else, so physically I’m landing in two and a half hours, but emotionally I’m still somewhere suspended trying to process a fifty percent chance like it’s a normal thing to carry around.

What they found is a “suspected malignant tissue” in my left breast, which is the kind of sentence that sounds very composed, medical and almost manageable until you realize it translates loosely to “we found something and we don’t like it, but we’re also not going to tell you exactly what it is yet, so congratulations, you now get to live inside a question mark for an unspecified amount of time.” Great. Fucking great.

And this didn’t just happen yesterday, it’s been about a month since they first found it, and I’m still not done processing it, which honestly feels like a personal failure only because everything else keeps moving like I should be caught up by now, like there’s a reasonable timeline for emotionally organizing a situation that hasn’t even fully explained itself yet, like I’m supposed to wake up one morning and be like “great, I’ve decided how I feel about possibly having cancer again, let’s circle back.”

The other day, in what I can only describe as a very on-brand coping mechanism, I tweeted this:

I added a laughing emoji like that somehow balanced the sentence out, which is both very me and also probably concerning, and my DMs low key exploded with concerned HasanAbi heads and followers asking if I was okay. I said I was, because… I am? But truthfully, nothing really prepares you for the experience of processing something like this while also reassuring strangers on the internet that you’re fine, or at least fine enough.

A little over three years ago, I had Stage 1 cervical cancer, which I now reference the way people talk about something they survived but didn’t exactly consent to learning from, because yes, it was caught early and treated and resolved on paper, but it doesn’t actually leave, it just quietly rewires the way your brain reacts to new information, so when certain words come up again, you don’t get the luxury of thinking of them as abstract.

So when I hear fifty percent now, I don’t hear a statistic, I hear a sequel, and not even a necessary one, more like one of the many Fast & Furious movies where things are just happening because they can, not because they should, and you’re left wondering who approved this and why it keeps escalating (and truly, those movies are so bad). If resilience is the lesson, I promise I’ve learned it. We can wrap this up now.

Because now the next step is an MRI on my boob, followed by surgery so they can go in and take tissue from inside it and finally figure out what this actually is, and that’s the point where everything shifts from something abstract and pending into something concrete and scheduled, something with dates and procedures and forms to sign, something that’s moving forward whether I’ve caught up to it emotionally or not. Which is very fucked up, but what else is new?

If there’s a God, and I’m saying this with respect but also with a very clear boundary, I would really like to opt the fuck out of any further character development, because I feel like I’ve already proven I can handle plot twists, emotional arcs, unexpected turns, all of it, and what I’d like now is a long stretch of time where nothing medically significant happens and my biggest concern is something deeply unimportant, like forgetting to buy coconut milk for my morning cafecito.

I did briefly consider that if the universe insists on giving me experiences, it could at least pivot to something I actually fucking want, like financial freedom, moving back to Manhattan, or Hasan Piker randomly DMing me to take me on a date and make out, which, in my opinion, is a perfectly reasonable substitute for whatever the fuck this is. But I digress.

It’s a little disorienting that from the outside everything looks exactly the same and you’re still expected to function normally, to answer emails, take care of your children, show up to things, participate in conversations that have nothing to do with any of this, while internally there’s this unresolved loop that just keeps running in the background like an app you can’t close.

People try to help, and I get it. Uncertainty makes everyone uncomfortable, so they offer optimism, stories, statistics, anything that might push things toward a better outcome, and I appreciate it even when it doesn’t quite land, because uncertainty doesn’t really respond to encouragement, it doesn’t shrink because someone told you to stay positive, it just exists, fully committed to not resolving on your timeline.

What I’ve noticed instead is how quickly I start treating my own body like something I need to analyze, like if I just pay enough attention I’ll find a clue that explains everything, even though I know that’s not how this works, because not everything follows a pattern you can decode if you just try hard enough.

And underneath all of that is just this steady awareness that I’m fucking tired, and yet I have to keep it pushing because I have to, while also thinking very clearly that I’ve had enough, that this should count as sufficient experience, that at some point the universe should look at your file and say okay, we can stop assigning this storyline now.

I’m writing this here because this is my safe space. I’m very much not looking for pity or reassurance, I just need somewhere to put all of this so it’s not just sitting in my head all day, because if I don’t get it out in some form, it’s going to start taking up more space than it already has, and I’d prefer not to reach a point where my only coping mechanism is spiraling quietly in my own thoughts.

I obviously don’t know yet which side of the fifty percent I’m on, and that’s the reality I’m sitting in. This suspended space where everything could still go either way and I have to exist inside that uncertainty without letting it take over everything else, which sounds very composed when you say it like that, but in practice just means continuing to live your life while carrying something that refuses to resolve.

So I keep going. I move through the normal parts of my life, I show up where I need to, I take care of what’s in front of me, and I carry this quietly in the background, occasionally making jokes about it because the alternative feels less sustainable, and honestly if I don’t laugh at the fact that my body is apparently workshopping another plot twist, I’m not entirely sure what the other option is.

Until I know more, this is what exists, a number that’s doing far more emotional work than it should, a possibility that hasn’t fully formed, and the slow, deeply exhausting process of waiting for an answer that I may or may not be ready to hear, but will inevitably have to.

This too shall pass. Right? Right?!

In Puerto Rico, the political conversation has been dominated for decades by one central issue: status. Whether the island should become a state, pursue independence, or maintain its current territorial relationship with the United States is not just a policy debate, it’s the axis around which entire political parties are built. Campaigns are organized around it, elections are framed through it, and leadership is often defined by where someone stands on it. For anyone outside the island, it can seem like the natural place to focus. For people living through it, it increasingly feels like something else entirely.

At some point, the status conversation stopped feeling like a path forward and started feeling like a loop. The same arguments resurface every few months, the same promises get repackaged, and the same sense of urgency is manufactured around a question that, while important, has been stretched to carry far more than it can realistically hold. Meanwhile, everything else continues moving in the background. Systems don’t improve, costs keep rising, and the experience of living on the island becomes harder to ignore. The disconnect is no longer subtle. People are being asked to choose between long-term political futures while still trying to survive the present.

That problem isn’t abstract — it shows up in the everyday ways people move through the island. It’s the reality of dealing with an unstable power grid, where outages are still common enough to disrupt work, school, and basic routines. It’s the cost of living creeping upward while wages don’t keep pace, forcing people to make constant adjustments just to maintain some version of stability. It’s public schools closing across multiple communities as a response to budget pressures that never seem to ease. It’s a healthcare system where access depends heavily on geography and resources, leaving too many people navigating gaps instead of receiving consistent care. These are not future problems, they are very much present conditions.

Status isn’t an irrelevant conversation, but it has been turned into something that functions more like a placeholder than a plan. It absorbs attention, it organizes campaigns, and it gives politicians a language that feels definitive without requiring immediate results. When every issue can be framed as something that will only be resolved once status is settled, accountability becomes easy to defer. It creates a structure where nothing has to be fixed now because everything is positioned as something that will be fixed later. That logic has been repeated through multiple administrations, regardless of party, and it has led to the same outcome: prolonged inaction paired with confident messaging.

Even moments that should have forced a shift in priorities have been folded back into that same pattern. After Hurricane María hit the island back in 2017, the conversation briefly centered on infrastructure, energy independence, and the need for a more resilient system. And yet, years later, the island is still dealing with the consequences of delayed modernization, privatization debates that have not fully resolved underlying issues, and a power system that remains fragile. After the protests that led to the resignation of Ricardo Rosselló back in 2019, there was a visible demand for accountability and a different kind of leadership. That moment created the expectation that governance itself would become the focus. Instead, the broader political discourse gradually returned to familiar ground, where status once again took center stage.

The problem isn’t that Puerto Ricans don’t understand the implications of status options. It’s that understanding them doesn’t fix the day-to-day reality people are navigating. Infrastructure doesn’t stabilize itself through ideology. The cost of living doesn’t adjust based on political alignment. Public services don’t become reliable because a party has a clearer position on status. Those things require execution, management, and a level of attention that goes beyond framing the island’s future in abstract terms. They require a government that treats governance as an ongoing responsibility, not as something that begins after a larger question is resolved.

There is also a question of priority that becomes harder to ignore the longer this pattern continues. Status deserves discussion, but it can’t continue to be the central offering in place of outcomes, or the thing that fills the space where measurable progress should be. When people talk about being tired of the conversation, what they’re really expressing is fatigue with the imbalance. The issue isn’t that the topic exists, because it should be part of the conversation, but that it has been allowed to dominate at the expense of everything else that directly shapes people’s lives.

What would it look like to evaluate leadership differently, focusing on whether anything actually improves under their watch instead of how clearly they position themselves within the status debate. What would it look like to evaluate leadership differently. To center the question on whether anything actually improves under their watch. Do systems become more functional? Do people feel a shift in their daily lives? Is there evidence of follow-through instead of repetition? That kind of evaluation shifts the focus away from identity and toward performance, away from alignment and toward results. It asks a more immediate question, moving past what future is being promised and into what present is being managed.

The longer the current dynamic continues, the harder it becomes to separate the conversation from the role it plays in maintaining inertia. Status remains unresolved, and in that unresolved space, it becomes a convenient center point around which everything else can be delayed. That might serve a political purpose, but it doesn’t serve the people living through it. The expectation that individuals should remain fully engaged in a debate about long-term outcomes while basic systems continue to fall short creates a kind of exhaustion that isn’t about apathy. It’s about misalignment between what is being discussed and what is being experienced.

Puerto Rico doesn’t lack clarity on status positions, it lacks consistent, competent governance that operates regardless of where that conversation lands. It lacks leadership that treats public service as something measurable and continuous instead of conditional. Status will always be part of the island’s reality, but it cannot continue to function as a substitute for results. At some point, the question stops being what Puerto Rico is going to become and starts being whether the people in charge are actually doing the work required to make life here function in the meantime.

There’s absolutely nothing dignified about being asked to celebrate the freedom of a country that continues to deny your own.

When Governor Jenniffer González Colón announced yesterday the signing of Executive Order 2026-019 to “strengthen” Puerto Rico’s role in the United States Semiquincentennial, the framing was the same old idiotic bullshit. It was presented as a historic opportunity, a moment to highlight Puerto Rico’s contributions, a reason to feel pride in being part of something larger. That language is polished and familiar, but it leans on a kind of pride that doesn’t hold up under scrutiny. It pushes celebration while sidestepping everything that complicates it.

Puerto Rico is being positioned as a participant in a national milestone rooted in the idea of self determination while still existing under a political arrangement that doesn’t grant it that same right. That contradiction isn’t subtle or abstract. It shapes the island’s reality every single day. Puerto Ricans can’t vote for the president who governs them, can’t exercise full control over their political future, and continue to live under federal authority without equal representation. None of that disappears because the moment is labeled historic.

The emphasis on “highlighting contributions” is doing more work than it seems because it centers what Puerto Ricans have given, what we’ve proven, how we’ve shown up for a country that hasn’t fully shown up for us in return. And yes, there’s truth in those contributions. Puerto Ricans have fought in U.S. wars, built communities, shaped culture, and sustained an economy that’s long been tied to external decisions. But constantly returning to contributions as the basis for belonging creates a dynamic where recognition has to be earned over and over again, while equality stays out of reach.

The America250 initiative is about deciding how the United States wants to see itself at 250 years and who gets to be included in that reflection. Puerto Rico’s role in that narrative is being carefully constructed as one of participation and loyalty, as a place that contributes, supports, and celebrates. There’s no indication that this moment will be used to confront the reality of Puerto Rico’s political status or to question the terms under which that relationship exists.

Once you sit with the contradiction long enough, the whole thing starts to unravel. You can’t ignore that Puerto Rico is being asked to validate a story of freedom that we’ve never been fully allowed to experience. And it becomes harder to convince yourself that being included in the celebration means anything close to having actual power.

What makes this incredibly frustrating is how often this kind of messaging is framed as pragmatism. There’s an assumption that aligning with the United States, emphasizing shared identity, and leaning into moments like this is the smart, realistic approach. But to me, realism should be grounded in outcomes. Puerto Rico is still dealing with major economic instability, a failing energy system, and a political structure that limits its autonomy. Those conditions have persisted through decades of alignment and participation. There’s no evidence that “celebrating” or playing nice changes that.

There’s also the question of who this is really for, and it’s hard to ignore. The tone doesn’t read like it’s speaking to Puerto Ricans who deal with the consequences of this political reality every day. It reads like it’s aimed outward, like it’s trying to reassure, to prove loyalty, to signal that Puerto Rico knows its place within a broader national framework. That kind of signaling comes at a cost because it forces you to downplay the very tensions that define the relationship.

At some point, you can’t separate that messaging from the reality it’s trying to soften. Puerto Rico is being asked to participate in a commemoration of independence while still living under something that falls short of it. There’s no version of that that doesn’t feel deeply uncomfortable, no way to present it that removes the imbalance underneath.

It’s humiliating and infuriating to be told to celebrate freedom as a spectator. It’s absurd to be invited into a narrative that depends on ignoring the limits placed on your own political existence, while watching our leadership lean into that moment as if participation alone is something to aspire to.

Puerto Rico doesn’t need another opportunity to prove its contributions because that’s never been the issue. The issue has always been whether those contributions translate into power, into representation, into the ability to define our own future without mediation.

A “celebration” without equality or unity is compliance, and thinking otherwise is incredibly ignorant. And at some point, that should stop being acceptable.

I feel like I’m failing at everything, and I don’t mean that in a dramatic, life-is-falling-apart kind of way. I mean it in a “What-the-fuck?” persistent way that shows up in the middle of the day while I’m moving from one responsibility to the next without ever fully finishing anything, in the moments where I realize I’m physically present but mentally somewhere else, trying to keep track of everything that still needs to get done.

When I’m working, I’m thinking about my kids, about what I haven’t done at home, about the small things that start to pile up and take on more weight than they should. When I’m with my kids, I’m thinking about work, about emails I haven’t answered, deadlines I’m already behind on, messages that are sitting there waiting for me. There’s always something unfinished, delayed, or that could have been handled better if I had just a little more time, focus, and more of myself to give. Nothing ever really feels done. It just shifts from one space to another.

And then there are the parts of my life that don’t fit neatly into anyone else’s expectations. One of my kids is autistic, which means that presence isn’t just about being there, it’s about being attuned in a way that requires a different level of attention, patience, and flexibility. It means routines are important, but so does knowing when they’re going to fall apart. It means navigating moments that can’t be rushed, emotions that can’t be postponed, needs that don’t wait until I’ve cleared my inbox or finished a project. It adds a layer that isn’t visible from the outside, but it shapes everything about how my time and energy are spent.

At the same time, I freelance, which means there isn’t a fixed schedule or a safety net built into my work. There’s no guaranteed income, no paid time off, no structure that holds things in place when life gets complicated. If I don’t work, things don’t get paid. If I fall behind, there isn’t a system that absorbs that impact for me. The flexibility that freelancing is supposed to offer often just translates into being available all the time, because the line between working and not working is always shifting depending on what’s needed.

So I’m not just balancing work and motherhood. I’m managing unpredictability on both sides in ways that don’t cancel each other out, they just compound.

For a long time, I thought this was something I should be able to fix. I told myself that if I were more organized or disciplined, if I planned my days better or managed my time more carefully, I’d be able to stay on top of everything in a manner that actually felt sustainable. I believed there was a version of this life where I could be fully present with my kids, productive at work, and still have enough left over for myself at the end of the day. I haven’t found that version, and I’m starting to think it doesn’t exist in the way we’ve been told it does.

The expectations themselves don’t fit together. Work still operates as if the person doing it has uninterrupted time and full attention, as if there are no competing responsibilities that carry the same urgency or importance. Motherhood doesn’t allow for that kind of separation, and raising a child with additional needs makes that even more apparent. It requires presence that is immediate and constant, emotional energy that can’t be scheduled or contained, attention that gets pulled in directions you can’t always anticipate. Both of these roles expect a full version of you, and the only way to meet them at the same time is to stretch yourself in ways that don’t feel sustainable.

So I do what I can to keep everything moving. I answer messages while I cook. I finish work after bedtime. I adjust my day around what my kids need, and then I adjust it again around what my work demands. I keep track of everything because if I don’t, things start to fall apart in ways that are hard to recover from. From the outside, it probably looks like I’m managing, like I’ve figured out how to make it work. From the inside, it feels like I’m constantly catching up, hyper aware of what I haven’t done yet, or trying to stay just ahead of everything that could go wrong.

The most fucked up part is that the standards don’t adjust... ever. Work still expects consistency and output, and clients assume a level of availability that doesn’t reflect reality. Motherhood still expects patience, presence, emotional steadiness, regardless of how exhausted I feel or how much I’m carrying in other areas of my life. There isn’t a version of this where either one becomes less demanding, and there isn’t a moment where everything aligns in ways that make life feel balanced.

When something slips, it feels personal. Missing a deadline, losing patience, forgetting something small, it all carries a weight that feels larger than it should, like proof that I’m not doing enough or not doing it well enough. It becomes easy to internalize that feeling, to believe that the problem is me, that I’m the one who can’t keep up.

But when I step back from it, it’s hard to ignore what’s actually happening. What looks like individual failure is often the result of pressure that doesn’t get acknowledged. Not everyone is navigating this in the same way, and the differences matter. Support, when it exists, changes everything. When it doesn’t, everything narrows down to one person, and that changes the entire experience of trying to hold all of this together.

I handle it because I don’t have a choice. I figure it out because there isn’t any other option. I keep going because stopping isn’t realistic. And still, there’s that quiet, persistent feeling that I’m falling short, that I’m not doing enough, that I’m failing at everything in a sense that’s incredibly hard to fully explain, but very much impossible to ignore.

I don’t think that feeling is coming from nowhere. I think it’s a response to trying to meet expectations that were never built to exist together, to carrying more than one person is meant to carry at once, to navigating a life that requires constant adjustment with very little margin for error.

Some days feel manageable. Other days are a fucking disaster. There isn’t a consistent rhythm that makes all of this feel balanced or resolved. The feeling of failing at everything doesn’t come from a lack of effort. It comes from the reality of what this actually requires, from the constant negotiation between competing demands, from the awareness that something is always being left undone.

But one thing I know for sure is this: if it feels like too much sometimes, it’s because it probably is. And calling it a personal failure only makes it easier to ignore how unsustainable this really is.

A political party that can’t convince people it understands their material reality will eventually start arguing about who is allowed to speak instead. That is where parts of the Democratic establishment find themselves now. Costs keep rising, war continues to escalate abroad, approval ratings remain weak. Voters keep expressing frustration with institutions that feel distant and unresponsive. In that context, the attention given to Hasan Piker stands out. He doesn’t hold office, write legislation or control policy. Yet he commands attention from an audience that the Democratic Party has struggled to reach.

For decades, political communication in the United States moved through a relatively stable system. Legacy media, consultants, party officials, and donors shaped the message and determined how it traveled. Even internal disagreements followed a predictable rhythm. The structure created limits around who could speak and how they were expected to sound. Today, that same structure no longer holds.

Hasan operates outside of it. He speaks without institutional approval, and doesn’t rely on access to power. His language reflects the pace and tone of the internet rather than the caution of traditional politics. His audience responds to that clarity, even when they don’t agree with everything he says (Including myself).

The reaction from parts of the Democratic establishment reflects discomfort with that shift. The focus has turned toward discrediting the messenger instead of examining why the message resonates. Criticism centers on tone, delivery, and perceived legitimacy. Very little of it engages with the underlying conditions driving people toward alternative voices in the first place. That gap doesn’t seem to stop growing.

Younger voters have been moving away from the party, particularly young men who feel disconnected from political messaging that rarely speaks to their reality. Many aren’t aligning themselves with a coherent ideology. They’re looking for voices that acknowledge their frustrations in direct terms. Hasan reaches that audience in a way that traditional political figures often fail to do. That reach carries influence, even without formal authority.

The response, of course, hasn’t been neutral. Some Democratic officials have gone out of their way to distance themselves from Hasan, publicly rejecting any association with him while others cautiously explore whether engaging his audience is politically necessary. This goes beyond commentary about a streamer. It shows a party actively debating who gets to shape its future and how far it is willing to go to reach voters it has already lost.

That tension becomes clearer when you look at where the backlash is coming from. The criticism isn’t only about tone or delivery — it’s tied to deeper disagreements over foreign policy, especially around Israel, where divisions inside the party have intensified. Taking this into consideration, the reaction to Hasan starts to look less like a principled stand and more like an attempt to enforce some kind of fucked up boundary around what kind of criticism is considered acceptable.

Authority no longer depends solely on institutional backing. It emerges through attention, consistency, and the ability to speak in a way that feels grounded in lived experience. That form of influence can’t be easily managed or absorbed into existing structures. It resists control, and that resistance creates anxiety for a party accustomed to setting the terms of its own discourse.

It’s important to understand that people aren’t turning to independent voices out of loyalty to individuals. They’re responding to a sense that someone is naming problems directly. Economic pressure, foreign policy decisions, and a broader feeling of political stagnation shape that response. When those concerns are met with messaging that feels distant or overly managed, the disconnect becomes more obvious. In that context, the rise of alternative voices isn’t surprising. It reflects a shift that has been building for years.

The question shouldn’t be why a streamer has influence, but why elected officials are unable to command the same level of attention from the people they claim to represent. Until that gap is taken seriously, this cycle will keep repeating itself like an endless loop. New voices will emerge, and new controversies will take their place. The party will continue to argue about who is acceptable instead of confronting why it keeps losing the plot.

And each time it does, it will move a little further away from the people it needs the most.

Let’s just start here, because the fake concern is exhausting to watch and even more exhausting to pretend it’s coming from a real place. I’m going to make this perfectly clear: most of the people who got angry and loud this weekend about influencers, public figures, and collectives traveling to Cuba do not actually care about the island. They don’t care about the people living there, or about the complexity of the situation, and they definitely don’t care about solidarity unless it’s quiet, invisible, and convenient. What they care about is the reactionary outrage, the chance to position themselves as morally superior without ever having to engage with anything beyond a tweet. Because that’s what this was, a fucking performance.

The reaction was immediate and, at least for me, strangely coordinated and fueled in part by headlines framing the entire situation as “tone-deaf activists” vacationing in luxury while the island collapses, reducing an incredibly complex humanitarian moment into something to mock and dismiss all because they want to provoke, flatten, and redirect attention away from the actual conditions on the ground and toward the people who showed up.

Cuba is currently experiencing one of the most severe crises in its recent history, with nationwide blackouts, a collapsing energy grid, fuel shortages, and disruptions to basic services like water and healthcare. Millions of people have been left without electricity, sometimes for days at a time, with hospitals and essential services operating under extreme strain. In many places, even access to water depends on electricity, forcing people to line up and transport it manually when systems fail.

Of course, this didn’t come out of nowhere. Cuba has been under a U.S. economic blockade for decades, but what’s happening now is an escalation. A tightening of restrictions, particularly around fuel, has pushed the country into an even deeper crisis by cutting off access to oil and limiting its ability to sustain its already fragile infrastructure. The result is not just economic strain, but a chain reaction that affects everything from food production to hospital operations to basic sanitation.

While timelines were flooded with outrage about who stayed in what hotel, there were also international efforts mobilizing to bring actual aid into the country. A global convoy involving activists, unions, and organizations coordinated the delivery of food, medicine, and solar equipment precisely because shortages have reached a critical point. That is the reason people went, because there is a material humanitarian crisis that requires immediate response and exposure. But of course, that part is inconvenient.

It’s much easier to focus on optics than to engage with systems. It’s easier to critique where someone slept than to ask why an entire country is struggling to keep its lights on. And that is exactly what a lot of this “outrage” chose to do.

Cuba, for many people, is not treated as a real place with real people navigating layered conditions. It’s seen as a symbol, something to argue about and weaponize in political discourse. Something to reduce into a clean narrative that fits whatever point needs to be made. The moment that narrative is disrupted by people physically being there, documenting, interacting, and exposing the truth, the response is immediate rejection.

If you come from a place where you understand what it feels like to live under systems that shape your daily life in ways you don’t fully control, where infrastructure failures are not shocking but expected, where decisions made elsewhere ripple into your everyday existence, then it becomes very difficult to look at Cuba and treat it like an abstract debate. You recognize the weight of how these conditions accumulate over time, and how quickly people who are not living it reduce it into something digestible.

Let’s be honest, what we’re seeing is not good faith criticism, and that refusal to engage with complexity is incredibly frustrating to witness. The constant need to discredit the act itself so that the conversation can remain shallow, controlled, and comfortable is truly maddening. Because if you admit that there is any value in people going, in people documenting, in people paying attention, then you also have to confront your own distance from it. You have to ask what you’ve done beyond reacting. You have to acknowledge that visibility, even imperfect visibility, can shift attention in ways that silence never will.

For me, what makes this so infuriating and dishonest is how easily people will spend hours dissecting optics while completely ignoring the reality that made any of this necessary in the first place. Entire conversations dedicated to who stayed where, who posted what, who said the “right” or the “wrong” thing, while millions of people are dealing with blackouts, food shortages, collapsing infrastructure, and a system under pressure that has been building for decades. The part that should make people angry is that this situation exists at all and continues to exist while so many people remain comfortably detached from it.

Why is it so difficult to sit with and actually understand what sustained economic pressure, political isolation, and global indifference do to a country over time? It’s incredibly frustrating how quickly people move to police visibility while remaining almost completely silent about the conditions that visibility is trying, however imperfectly, to expose.

If these people actually gave a fuck about Cuba, the outrage would not have started with who showed up. It would have started with why showing up was necessary at all.

There’s a point where you stop asking whether the system is failing and start realizing that it’s actually doing exactly what it was built to do, and that realization changes the way you read every headline, every policy, every argument about fairness that never quite makes sense.

You scroll through headlines and threads and opinion pieces, you watch people debate healthcare, student debt, taxes, and what people deserve, and there’s always this quiet awareness in the background that never really goes away, this understanding that you are witnessing a conversation that affects you but doesn’t center you, a system that governs you but does not fully see you, and a political reality where your existence is acknowledged just enough to be counted but not enough to be prioritized.

From here in Puerto Rico, the system doesn’t feel broken, and that’s the part that’s hardest to explain to people who still believe that dysfunction is accidental. What you begin to understand over time is that things can function exactly as intended and still produce outcomes that feel unjust, and once you reach that understanding, it becomes very difficult to hold on to the idea that all of this is simply the result of inefficiency or oversight.

If something were truly broken, there would be urgency around fixing it, there would be accountability, and a clear recognition that something clearly isn’t working. But when something continues, year after year, policy after policy, administration after administration, what you’re really looking at is consistency, and that’s how you know it isn’t accidental.

It’s very easy for people within the mainland to talk about representation as an abstract principle, as something tied to civic duty, voter turnout or party alignment. But from here, representation is something you learn to understand through absence, through the quiet realization that decisions are made every single day that shape your reality without your direct participation, and that even when those decisions impact your cost of living, access to resources, infrastructure, and your future, your voice is still filtered through layers of distance that make it feel almost theoretical.

You learn to watch closely because you have to, because those policies still reach you, they still affect your daily life, they still show up in your bills, in schools, in the stability you try to build for your children — but you’re always watching from a position where influence feels limited and visibility feels conditional. Over time, that creates a very specific kind of exhaustion. This is a pattern that repeats itself with enough frequency that it reshapes expectations, until people stop questioning it altogether. And that’s the problem.

There’s also a particular frustration in hearing conversations about access, especially when it’s treated as proof that something is working, because access without affordability, stability, or equity isn’t the same thing as justice, and yet, those distinctions are often flattened in political discourse in ways that make it easier to claim progress without actually addressing the deeper issues that continue to affect people’s lives.

From here, those gaps aren’t theoretical, they’re lived and very much visible — they are part of the everyday decisions you have to make about how to stretch money, plan for uncertainty, navigate systems that feel distant and unresponsive, and create some sense of stability in an environment where stability is never guaranteed.

There’s a moment, at some point, where this frustration shifts into something more clear and grounded, where you stop asking why things are the way they are and start recognizing that the system isn’t failing to include you, it’s simply not structured to prioritize you in the first place. That realization changes the way you see everything, because it removes the illusion that this is temporary or accidental.

It becomes harder to believe in eventual fixes when the pattern itself feels intentional, when the gaps remain consistent, when the conversations continue to move forward without fully accounting for the people who are still being affected from the margins, and when the expectation becomes that you should continue adapting to a system that has never fully adapted to you.

For me, that’s the most difficult part to sit with — the understanding that so much of what people are arguing about is real, urgent and so fucking important. Yet they’re still incomplete, because there are entire realities that exist just outside the center of those conversations that are impacted by every policy decision, but rarely shape the direction of the debate.

Living with that awareness changes the way you engage with politics. It forces you to hold two truths at once, that these conversations matter deeply and are still not enough, that progress can exist and still leave people behind, and that visibility doesn’t always translate into power.

At some point, the realization starts feeling like urgency, because once you understand that the system is functioning exactly as it was designed to, it becomes impossible to keep treating its outcomes as something that will eventually correct itself.

That awareness shifts something deeper — it forces you to confront the role you play within it. We have to decide now whether to keep adapting to it or to begin pushing against it in ways that disrupt the comfort of those who benefit from it.

This fight doesn’t come with any guarantees, and it obviously doesn’t promise immediate results, but it does create a different kind of energy rooted in refusal, in persistence, and in the understanding that change has never come from being quietly accounted for.

Once you see it clearly, the system doesn’t become something you hope will improve.

It becomes something you are willing to challenge.

The public is being asked, once again, to accept war as a given. To absorb another cycle of escalation, justifications, and the usual parade of officials explaining why violence is necessary, regrettable, and ultimately unavoidable. We are told to trust the process, to defer judgment, to stay quiet until the dust settles. It never does.

Every war arrives wrapped in the same vocabulary. Defense. Security. Stability. Humanitarian concern. These words are constantly used like shields. They exist to shut down debate before it starts, to demand obedience first and accountability later. Anyone who hesitates is framed as unserious, naive, or morally confused. Meanwhile, the machinery of war moves forward with remarkable clarity.

What’s being normalized is permanent escalation. That reality is now unmistakable in the growing US–Israel–Iran confrontation, where every move is framed as defensive, every provocation as unavoidable, and every civilian consequence as an unfortunate footnote. The United States presents itself as a stabilizing force while actively underwriting escalation. Israel frames aggression as existential necessity. Iran is reduced to a singular threat, stripped of context or consequence. The result is a familiar script: diplomacy presented as weakness, restraint mocked as cowardice, and the public slowly conditioned to accept regional war as the price of maintaining dominance. This outcome is the result of deliberate choice.

As a Puerto Rican, I’m intimately familiar with how empire works. We were granted citizenship as utility, an irony made sharper today as Puerto Rico marks American Citizenship Day. We are American enough to be drafted and taxed, yet never American enough to be protected from austerity, neglect, or abandonment. When war is framed as a defense of freedom, the question becomes unavoidable. Whose freedom is being prioritized, and whose lives are being volunteered?

We are constantly told that war keeps us safe, that it’ll bring peace. History suggests otherwise. What war reliably produces are bloated military budgets, hollowed-out social services, and generations marked by trauma. Veterans return home carrying wounds that ceremonies cannot heal. Families abroad are left to rebuild from rubble with little more than memory and grief. If war delivered the security it promises, we would not still be trapped in this cycle.

Public dissent is treated as a problem to be managed. Question U.S. or Israeli military actions and the accusations arrive immediately. Disloyalty, extremism, moral blindness — or my personal favorite, antisemitism. Civilian deaths are dismissed as complicated. Accountability is framed as unrealistic. This inversion is deliberate and moral numbness is rewarded.

What’s perhaps the most alarming thing to me is how ordinary this has become. Escalation is discussed like weather. Retaliation is framed as reflex. No one is expected to ask who is authorizing the violence, who is profiting from it, or who will be left to bury the dead. War is a policy choice made by people who will never bleed for it.

Being sick of wars is recognition that mass destruction and death cannot be the default solution to political failure. It’s the recognition that people everywhere deserve to live without being reduced to abstractions or strategic assets.

We’re incredibly sick and tired of wars because we understand them all too well. We know who pays the price and who walks away untouched. We know how grief is buried under flags and slogans. We know that every escalation is a decision. This exhaustion is clarity. And clarity, once it settles in, becomes refusal.

American political culture has settled into a posture toward Israel that no longer resembles alliance politics. Now more than ever, it looks like institutional submission, where scrutiny fades, consequences stall out, and moral language gets selectively disabled the moment Palestinian lives enter the conversation. Officials still perform their commitment to democracy and human rights on nearly every issue, yet those commitments collapse on contact with Israeli policy, where mass civilian death, forced displacement, apartheid governance, and now openly genocidal conditions get treated as tolerable, strategic, or simply too inconvenient to confront honestly.

This issue keeps getting dismissed as paranoia or conspiracy, which serves as a convenient way to avoid grappling with how power actually functions in the United States. Power on the mainland rarely needs secrecy. It operates through money, donor discipline, lobbying pressure, media incentives, and political fear, all of which function openly and predictably. When those forces align to shield a single foreign government from criticism regardless of evidence, scale of violence, or public opposition, the issue becomes structural. Accountability isn’t absent by accident, but by design.

Palestine sits at the center of that design. Palestinian lives remain politically disposable in American discourse, reduced to abstractions, reframed as security threats, or erased through euphemism. Military aid flows without any conditions, diplomatic cover holds firm despite international outrage, and mainstream media narratives consistently privilege Israeli justification while treating Palestinian testimony as suspect or secondary. It’s a pattern so entrenched that major human rights organizations, including jewish groups, have named it plainly as apartheid, describing a system of legal segregation, restricted movement, unequal rights, and permanent domination enforced through military violence.

Even apartheid fails to fully capture the current moment. What Palestinians are living through is a genocide, and the refusal to name it reflects political cowardice rather than uncertainty. Entire neighborhoods erased, civilian infrastructure deliberately destroyed, food and medical access restricted, and mass death normalized through bureaucratic language all point in the same direction. The insistence on avoiding the word doesn’t preserve nuance, but deniability.

As a Puerto Rican, none of this feels abstract. Colonialism insists domination is temporary, suffering is unfortunate but unavoidable, and resistance itself proves the need for repression. Puerto Rico knows what governance without consent means, how sovereignty becomes symbolic while control remains material, and how entire populations get trained to expect less while being told to be grateful for it. Watching Palestinians live under apartheid and genocidal assault doesn’t feel foreign to me. It’s incredibly familiar, just carried out with greater violence and fewer restraints.

What pushes this moment from disturbing into enraging lies in how any criticism of Israel now gets reflexively labeled antisemitic. That narrative is incredibly dangerous, wrong, manipulative, and exhausting. Criticizing a state for apartheid, mass killing, or genocide isn’t hatred of Jewish people, and pretending otherwise doesn’t make anyone safer. It weaponizes Jewish identity to shield a government from accountability while hollowing out the real fight against antisemitism, which depends on clarity rather than censorship. This conflation poisons public discourse and turns moral honesty into a professional and political liability.

The United States claims to defend democratic norms, yet its behavior exposes how conditional those norms truly are. Free speech matters until it challenges Israeli policy. Human rights matter until enforcement disrupts strategic alignment. Elections matter until voters demand something donors oppose. When lawmakers panic at the suggestion of a ceasefire, when student protesters face repression rather than engagement, and when acknowledging Palestinian death triggers institutional backlash, the contradiction starts being obscene.

That obscenity becomes even harder to ignore when American senators and members of Congress openly declare “Israel first” with no sense of irony or lack of shame. These are elected officials sworn to represent people living in the United States, many of whom can’t even afford rent, healthcare, or basic stability, yet they compete to signal allegiance to a foreign government engaged in apartheid and genocidal violence. In any other context, pledging loyalty to a foreign state over one’s own constituents would be treated as disqualifying and dangerous. In the U.S., it’s applauded, rewarded, and framed as moral seriousness. The inversion is staggering.

This is abdication. A political class willing to say “Israel first” while voting against the material needs of their own constituents reveals how hollow nationalist rhetoric has always been. “America First” never applied to Americans, and it certainly never applied to Palestinians. It applied to power, donors, and geopolitical priorities that have nothing to do with public will or moral responsibility. Watching lawmakers prioritize the demands of a foreign government over the lives of the people they were elected to serve exposes the lie at the center of American politics.

That lie extends beyond Palestine. Israeli leadership has repeatedly pushed the United States toward confrontation with Iran, including urging Washington to abandon diplomacy and consider military action against Iran’s supposed “nuclear program”. These demands are constantly stated openly and treated as legitimate policy positions within American political discourse. The fact that the United States even entertains the possibility of entering another catastrophic Middle Eastern war at the urging of a foreign government should terrify anyone who remembers Iraq, Afghanistan, and the manufactured consent that preceded both. Alignment this deep doesn’t just distort morality, it also risks dragging millions into another preventable disaster.

The domestic consequences are already visible. Universities suppress student organizing, workers face punishment for political speech, and lawmakers advance legislation designed to blur criticism of Israeli policy with antisemitism. These moves get sold as safety measures while functioning as repression, borrowing tools historically used against marginalized communities and redeploying them to enforce geopolitical obedience. Empire never keeps its methods contained. If history’s taught us anything, it’s that what gets justified abroad always finds its way home.

Public opinion has shifted, and the political system has refused to follow. Growing numbers of Americans recognize Palestinian suffering and reject the endless excuses used to justify it, particularly younger generations who’ve watched war after war sold through language that never matches reality. Despite that shift, policy remains frozen, revealing how shallow democratic influence becomes once it collides with entrenched money and institutional fear. Representation fails when elected officials listen upward instead of outward.

Palestine exposes the moral rot at the core of that failure. Apartheid and genocide don’t persist through force alone, but through silence, euphemism, delay, and the constant lowering of expectations. When moral language loses credibility, violence becomes administrative, processed through press briefings and policy memos rather than acknowledged as destruction. That transformation is incredibly dangerous. Why? Because the result of it is normalization.

Colonial systems survive because dissent gets managed, marginalized, and punished — I live it every day in Puerto Rico. The United States continues to function democratically in form while abandoning democratic substance whenever power demands silence and compliance. Palestinian life under apartheid and genocidal assault forces a reckoning with that contradiction, one that can’t be resolved through slogans, symbolic gestures, or carefully worded concern.

Truth telling unfortunately won’t end genocide or dismantle apartheid on its own, but silence guarantees complicity and euphemism guarantees endurance. Palestinians deserve recognition that isn’t conditional, freedom that isn’t negotiated through suffering, and dignity that isn’t treated as aspirational. Americans deserve a political system capable of moral coherence rather than selective outrage. Refusing to look away is the bare minimum, and even that now feels threatening to a system that depends on everyone pretending not to see what’s right in front of them.

There’s no ethical way to be successful under this system, because capitalism does not reward ethics, it rewards accumulation, and it does so by organizing life around the extraction of surplus value from labor, land, time, and care. I’ve learned this less through theory than through experience, through the constant negotiation between what I believe politically and what I have to do materially to stay afloat.

I participate in capitalism because I have to. I work because bills are due. I charge for my labor because me and my kids still need to eat whether the system is just or not. I make compromises not because I don’t understand the harm baked into the system, but because refusing to survive has never been a meaningful political strategy for people without wealth, power, or institutional protection. The fiction isn’t participation, is that participation can ever be clean.

Capitalism frames success as individual achievement, but nothing about it is individual. Every version of stability rests on someone else’s precarity. Someone is underpaid so someone else can feel secure. Someone’s labor is invisible so someone else’s comfort can appear effortless. That’s not an unfortunate side effect, but the core mechanism. Value is produced collectively and appropriated privately, and success simply measures proximity to that appropriation.

I see this most clearly when I look at my own labor. The work I do is evaluated not by its usefulness or care, but by how efficiently it can be converted into engagement, brand awareness, clicks, ROI, productivity, or growth. The care work I do as a mother is treated as infinite, natural, and free — even as it absorbs the shocks of a system that refuses to provide basic social infrastructure. Of course, none of this is accidental. Social reproduction has always been offloaded onto women so capital can continue extracting elsewhere.

For those of us in Puerto Rico, this dynamic is sharpened by colonialism. Our relationship to capital is mediated through empire. Our labor is cheapened by design. Our land is financialized. Our debt is weaponized. Our public services are hollowed out in the name of fiscal responsibility, while value flows outward to corporations and bondholders who will never live with the consequences. Success here often looks like proximity to capital or the ability to leave, not collective stability or control over our own conditions.

When people tell Puerto Ricans to pursue ethical success, what they’re really asking is for us to navigate extraction politely, to survive without demanding power, to accept scarcity as normal. If we struggle, it’s framed as mismanagement or cultural failure. If we succeed, it’s framed as complicity. Either way, the system never has to explain why survival itself feels so expensive.

This is why conversations about capitalism so often collapse into moral sorting instead of political analysis. People want to know which jobs are acceptable, which purchases are defensible, which ambitions are allowed. They want socialism to function as personal austerity rather than collective transformation. But focusing on individual purity is convenient for capital, because it redirects attention away from ownership, power, and exploitation, and toward behavior that never actually threatens the structure.

I’ve felt this pressure personally, especially in left spaces, where awareness is treated as if it should somehow shield you from rent, childcare costs, medical bills, or burnout. When you inevitably fail to reconcile political clarity with material precarity, the conclusion isn’t that the system is violent or unsustainable. It’s that you didn’t try hard enough to be good.

Marx was clear that material security is the precondition for political agency. Precarity isn’t radical — it’s disciplinary. A population that’s constantly tired, indebted, and afraid is easier to control and harder to organize. Capitalism depends on insecurity. Colonial capitalism depends on it even more. That’s why survival gets reframed as moral compromise, and suffering gets mistaken for virtue.

Survival is not a betrayal of socialist principles. Wanting stability is not false consciousness. Wanting rest, healthcare, childcare, housing, and time is not greed. It’s a rational response to a system that withholds those things in order to extract more labor. I don’t want purity, I want insulation. I want the ability to make one mistake without everything collapsing. I want a life where survival doesn’t consume all available energy.

For women and mothers like myself, this contradiction is especially brutal. We’re expected to absorb the failures of the system quietly, to provide unpaid labor endlessly, to hold everything together privately while being told not to ask for too much publicly. In Puerto Rico, where austerity and outmigration have gutted public infrastructure, survival itself becomes labor, and success is framed as individual escape rather than collective repair.

That’s why I reject purity politics that fixate on individual consumption while leaving systems of ownership, extraction, and power untouched. Shame does not alter class relations, guilt does not redistribute wealth, and measuring people’s politics by how much they deprive themselves only guarantees that the most vulnerable carry the heaviest burden of being “good”, while those with real power remain insulated and unnamed.

What socialism asks for is not cleaner participation in capitalism, but collective leverage over the conditions that make survival feel so expensive in the first place. It asks us to organize around material needs rather than moral performance, to demand housing, healthcare, childcare, debt relief, and time as social guarantees rather than individual rewards. It asks us to move away from a politics of personal sacrifice and toward one of shared protection.

For places like Puerto Rico, this means naming colonial capitalism for what it is and refusing frameworks that treat extraction as inevitable and austerity as discipline. It means understanding that our precarity is not accidental, and that stability will never come from proximity to capital but from control over land, labor, and public infrastructure. It means rejecting the idea that survival is something we have to earn individually, and insisting instead that it is something we owe each other collectively.

None of this requires pretending we can opt out of capitalism tomorrow. It requires clarity about where change actually comes from. Individual restraint will not dismantle systems built on exploitation, but collective organization can. That doesn’t begin with purity or sacrifice. It begins with refusing to let survival be treated as a moral flaw, and with building power in the places where people are currently isolated and exhausted.

There’s no ethical way to be successful under this system. The response is not withdrawal or self-denial. The response is solidarity, organization, and the insistence that life should not be this precarious by design. Wanting stability is not a failure of politics. It’s the starting point of one.